Muma
by Amaiko
Summary: When you possess a rare bloodline limit, it's usually best not to fall into the hands of a mad medical genius and his equally deranged master. Pity that Hinata doesn't have a choice in the matter. Spoilers up to the more recent chapters of the manga.
1. Prologue

Author's Note:

This was written because of my unfailing weakness for rare pairings, and because I am very, very tired of seeing the "Kabuto is a completely amoral dipshit who's only fucking around with Hinata for his own sick pleasure" plotline that seems to make up 98 percent of all KabuHina fic, especially since, as I argued in my January 28th entry in the Chuunin LJ community (thanks for not doing links correctly, ff.) there's a decent amount of evidence in the manga that Kabuto is not entirely evil, steeped in blood though his hands may be.

PG-13 for moderate violence, mild sexual situations, language and some grim stuff.

Just for clarification, the only honorifics I'm using here are -chan, -kun, and things like Hinata calling Neji "Neji-niisan"--in other words, things that don't have a direct equivalent in English. All other honorifics (such as -san, -sama, etc) and terms will be translated into their English counterparts, but place and proper names will be left in the original Japanese.

Also, this takes place in a AU timeline set sometime after Naruto returns to Konoha, but before Sai makes his appearance.

**Muma**

_Can you lick my wounds please_

_Can you make it numb_

_And kill the pain like cortizone_

_And grant me intimacy_

_How'll we split your chromosomes _

-Massive Attack, "Antistar".

**Prologue **

ANBU's deep interrogation rooms were set in rock, hundreds of feet below Konoha's surface, their location utterly unknown to the thousands of pairs of feet that walked over them daily. They worked by the light of lamps that burned low and weak, and sent oil sputtering in drops to the stone below. Even here, they did not remove their masks. Silent as the rocks themselves, they moved as easily as cats in the dark, wraiths that could vanish in the space between one blink and the next .

Ibiki Morino alone sat unmasked, behind a solid oak table that was bolted to the floor in the main interrogation room. ANBU filled the corners, save for the one where the Fifth Hokage sat, her pretty, round face set in an expression that swung between annoyance and active disdain.

Hinata sat away from Lady Tsunade and before Morino on a narrow, three-legged stool and fervently wished herself elsewhere, so filled with fear and tension that she burned with it, a constant ache nibbling her nerves into ragged sieves. She wiped her sweating palm on her pants leg and tried to keep herself under control.

_Better here than with Orochimaru, right? Though--though, right now there's not that much of a difference..._

With some difficulty, she pulled her attention back to what Morino was saying.

"--and let me offer you my sincere condolences on the death of your father, Lady Hinata." Morino's face was empty of any emotion but there was the smallest hint of something like pity in his eyes; Hinata took that in and clung to it with everything she had. She nodded, once. There had been weeks for her to get over her father's death, and to her utter shame, she had been too distracted with other events to properly mourn him. She hoped he would forgive her for the lapse. Once or twice she'd cried briefly, when she thought that no one would be able to hear or see her.

Kabuto had never liked it when she cried.

Morino spread folders on the desk in a wide fan; the records of her earlier testimony and medical examinations.

"Now then, we were discussing the particulars of Lady Hyuuga's captivity under Orochimaru, were we not? So many odd things to discuss. Forgive me, my lady, but you won't mind swearing to me again about the nature of your captivity, will you? I confess, I find it very surprising that, in addition to your lack of physical damage, you claim absolutely no intimate contact whatsoever took place while you were held prisoner--"

"Honestly, Morino!" the Fifth Hokage exploded from the background seat she had been relegated to; the interrogation was all ANBU's show, which she clearly and bitterly resented. "Do you have to be so damn blunt about it? I told you already that my examination found--"

He silenced her with a look. "From Lady Hinata's lips, please."

"I--" She tried to speak, and faltered under his uncompromising stare. "I--" The next attempt failed just as badly as the first one.

Lady Tsunade rose to her defense again, the chair creaking quietly with her movement; Hinata silently offered her thanks to every god she knew. Her chest ached horribly, and she put a hand to her heart, trying to either quiet it or stop the pain. It defied her and continued to beat wildly under her hand.

The Fifth's mouth was so thin a mosquito couldn't have landed on it. "Since you're scaring Hinata out of her wits and we seem to be dead set on repeating things already discussed, I'll state it again. Upon her return, Hinata was given an _exceedingly_ thorough medical examination by both myself and Shizune, one in which all possible factors were considered and examined for. We found absolutely no evidence of molestation or intercourse, forced or compliant." The Fifth raised her headdress just enough so the hard expression in her eyes was fully visible, then added: "She is, in short, still _virgo intacta_."

Morino pursed his lips slightly. "But you yourself stated some time back--in fact, I believe it was when the full extent of Yakushi's complicity with Orochimaru was discovered, in the reports you and Naruto Uzumaki made discussing the incident with Orochimaru--that Yakushi, at that point, 'surpassed the knowledge and skills I had as a medic ninja in my prime.' Didn't you?" The twitching around his mouth might have become a smile, if he ever let things get that far. "One of his specialties is known to be the regrowth of cells. Is it not possible then, that---"

"He never touched me. N-not like that. He only touched me when he was doing medical procedures. I swear to it." Hinata's whisper cut through Morino's insinuations and silenced Lady Tsunade's growing tirade; everyone's eyes moved to her, causing her to flush an even deeper scarlet.

The Hokage glanced at the cringing girl and sighed; the slight easing of her features combined with the low lighting brought the age back to her face. Bitterness was written there, and a rough pity. "Look, Morino. She's certainly not pregnant, and the only thing Kabuto seems to have inserted into her body was that tracking pellet, which I removed and destroyed with my own hands."

She jerked her chin towards where Hinata sat, her face dull with shame. "Naruto barely had time to set her on Konoha's ground before ANBU snapped her up and started the debriefing process. Hinata's been interrogated by ANBU from every angle from the moment she got back, her chakra and vitals carefully monitored--by ANBU-- to see if they showed any signs she was lying or under some kind of drug or compulsion. She wasn't. She isn't. Don't you think she's been through enough without having to reiterate all this to a new set of people every five minutes? If you're so bloody interested, as Head of ANBU's torture and interrogation department, you should have been there first!"

"Peace, Lady Hokage," Morino said, raising a hand for emphasis. "I apologize. Under normal circumstances, your word would likely be enough to satisfy things and the Lady Hyuuga could return home, where she is no doubt badly needed, instead of having to spend a week under observation here. However--if you'll allow me to repeat myself again--this is not a normal situation. This is the Hyuuga Heir being held captive by one of Konoha's greatest enemies and his second in command--who just happens to be a medic-nin of unusual skill and cunning--for six months, and then said Heir being retrieved after an assault on Orochimaru's lair apparently sound in both body and mind.

Considering that when we do find our ninja after they've been in contact with Orochimaru, they're usually enslaved corpses or in pieces at worst, severely injured at best. And yet for some reason, Lady Hinata was spared. Treated remarkably well, by Orochimaru's standards anyway, from what she tells us. So, you'll forgive me if I want to hear all the details again--for the sake of my own curiosity."

Hinata's fingers clenched on her lap, creasing the coarse fabric of her pants. Unable to find a good argument against Morino's reasonable words, the Fifth retreated into her corner, grumbling. "I know. I _know_. But I'd prefer that Hinata not end up as scarred by her debriefing as she has been by her stay at Orochimaru's."

The Chief Interrogator chuckled, though it sounded more like a rock being chipped than human laughter. "Your opinion and suggestions have been duly noted, my lady. However, at this point, Lady Hinata has nothing but time; she, by Konoha, Council and ANBU edict, must remain here for at least a week. So she might as well spend her time doing something profitable."

He snapped his fingers and one of the ANBU posted in the room gave him a notebook and pen that appeared out of thin air, without the customary scroll or puff of ninja smoke, more a magician's trick than a shinobi's. "Now then. For Lady Hinata's sake, we'll move off the more personal subjects and start with hard facts. We destroyed the one where you were found, but can you provide us with any information on Orochimaru's other lairs? Location, geographic details?"

She fought down a shiver, as much from Morino's gaze as the chill in the air; the interrogation rooms were kept deliberately cool in order to increase the subject's discomfort. "Not really. He changes lairs every week, sometimes even sooner than that if he thinks its been compromised--that much I know. And I overheard someone say that not all of the lairs are inside Sound territory. Some are inside other lands, but I don't know where."

"You never saw?"

She stared straight ahead. _You do look rather peaked, I think you could use some fresh air..._"Mr Kabuto would let me outside sometimes with two Sound ninja as escort so I could gather herbs and plants for his research. One of the locations was under a large tree, another was in a forest clearing. There was one that was underground, in a natural cave I think. But I don't have any idea where they were or even how far apart, because every time it was time to change lairs, he blinded me."

"Blinded you."

"Yes, or knocked me unconscious." _Stumbling through uncertain ground in complete blackness, clutching Kabuto's hand in a death's-grip, not caring if it made her seem weak, because he was the only certain thing in the world and if his hand slipped from hers, she'd be finished..._"Once we went to the new lair on a boat. But that was one of the times he knocked me out, so I don't know how long it took."

She swallowed against a dry throat and one of the ANBU silently lurking in the corner of the room materialized at her side to push forward a glass of water. She took a sip, tasted a bitterness so faint it was almost imperceptible-- _they've put something in it; I guess maybe something good came out of this after all, I'm so much better at noticing drugs and poisons now_--and felt her eyes fill with a sudden hot rush of tears, which she tried very hard to blink away unnoticed.

Morino was watching her with narrowed eyes; mountain granite held more mercy than his face. No doubt he was cataloging every single flicker of her lashes and drawing forth theories from them, each tiny movement another key to the story behind her story. But there really wasn't another story; what she had told them was the truth, every single word of it.

Her heartbeat quieted as she ran through the meditation and calming techniques that Kurenai-sensei had taught her, trying to force her body into a state of greater relaxation. Limpid as glass, as water, as light; separate the syllables, count them, relax. There was nothing to be afraid of. She had spoken the truth. Mostly.

What had it meant, that smile of his as he knelt in a pool of his own blood, watching her run back to Naruto-kun and Neji-niisan?

One of the ANBU coughed quietly. Morino took some more notes, eyes focused on the lines scratched by his pen. Without looking up, he said: "Continue. You said before he made you gather things for him? Did you assist him in other ways as well?"

Hinata's lips had gone slightly numb from the drug in the water; she resisted the urge to touch them to see if they were still there. "He had me take notes for him, help him with his research. Fetch and carry books and scrolls that he needed. Fortunately he didn't...make me work with the test subjects." _Not the live ones, anyway. _"The prisoners. Just made me write out the records for him."

"Now, why on earth would he do a thing like that?" Lady Tsunade interrupted, frowning as she leaned forward into the weak light. "Giving an enemy ninja access to the records of his experiments and the techniques he used? That's crazy. Any ninja worth their salt does their damnedest to keep their secrets hidden, and to think that someone of Kabuto Yakushi's intelligence would just openly let you see and mentally record what he was doing...?"

He hadn't showed her; he'd taken her around and boasted. Told her exactly what he'd done and how he'd done it, in detail, trying to make her understand his fascination with the underpinnings of the human form. "I don't think he ever intended for me to leave," Hinata told her softly; the Fifth's mouth thinned in response. She took a deep breath and continued: "H-he's really arrogant. I-I know he never thought I'd get away, because I was so weak compared to him and O-orochimaru. He told me that. A lot. And because of the pellet he put inside me. He'd always know exactly where I was because of it."

Slowly, her gaze slipped downward, too timid and frightened to keep her head up and straight; she took note of her twisting hands and the cracks in the floor. "He said I should do something to earn my keep, but I think he was joking," she whispered.

"Of course, there's always the possibility that the materials Lady Hinata was given access to were all faked," Morino rumbled; she glanced up at him to find him looking into the distance, eyes considering. "Given Yakushi's...history, we can't rule out that factor."

He was too proud of the results to have them be fakes, she thought, and bit her lip against saying it. She didn't want to think about that particular aspect. No prisoners huddling in dank cells, no corpses horribly mutated, Kabuto, cool as a cucumber as he sat at the dissection table, scalpel poised over the dead man's arm laying open on the tray in front of him, no thoughts of Orochimaru bending over her with a smile and the touch of his cold hands.

_Say it! Say it! Beg for it! For her life!_

Sweat ran down her back, soaking her thin shirt and settling into the waistband of her pants. They'd taken away the robes she'd worn at Otogakure, but not the hairclip, apparently thinking that it was one of hers; she could feel it pressing into her thigh, a plain oval of wood that shone dark amber, like honey held in light. Once she went home, once she had five minutes alone in her room to cry and pray and think things over, she'd bury it in one of the formal robe chests, where she would never have to look at it, and no one else ever could.

"Hinata." Startled, she managed to look up into Lady Tsunade's concerned face, her warm, fierce eyes. She took Hinata's hands in hers, gave them a little squeeze. "This is horrible. I know. I also know that you won't get over what happened for a while. Maybe not ever. But just remember,"--and her grip grew tighter, letting strength flow between the two of them like air and light--"that you're alive. You survived Kabuto and Orochimaru. Very few people can boast that. When there's life, there's hope."

She couldn't help it; despite the gravity of the situation and everything else she had endured in the last six months, she still blushed and smiled like crazy every time she said his name. "N-naruto-kun said the same thing. Almost the same thing."

"But the main reason she survived is because Yakushi was primarily interested in her as a research subject, yes? Trying to learn the secrets of the Byakugan." Morino snapped his notebook shut and gestured to an ANBU, who handed him a fresh one. He opened to first blank page, took up his pen again, and the look he fixed Hinata with was not an encouraging one.

"I think you'd better start back at the beginning, from the moment your mission went wrong, and tell us everything. And I do mean everything. Understand, Lady Hinata; I don't think you've done anything wrong. But this case is so spectacular, so unprecedented in the sheer strangeness of it that I don't intend to let a single thing slip past if it means learning something new about Orochimaru and his plans."

Lady Tsunade moved back into the shadows, but turned her chair around and brought it closer, the better to see and hear and gave comfort by touch, if needed. Morino's smile was really just a twitch of his lip, nothing more.

Hinata took one breath, then another and held them, feeling the memories of that day, and all the days after it gather behind her lips. There were some things so ugly she wanted to keep them in the dark forever, never let them live and breathe in the light beyond her mind. But if she kept them, they'd poison her, and unlike Mr. Kabuto, they wouldn't be leaving her an antidote.

So she closed her eyes and gave the dark things up to Morino and Lady Tsunade, who surely had the strength to take them from her. But she knew, even as she spoke her first words, that there were some things she would keep behind.

"We had just completed the mission and were heading back to Konoha when we noticed something odd in the woods..."

In her mind's eye, she could see the great dark flock of carrion birds wheeling away over the trees, into the sky.


	2. When the Light Falls Away

When the Light Falls Away.

A late summer sunset in Konoha, and the leaves were falling earlier than usual this year.

The village hummed its' closing-day song, wrapped in the last rays of scarlet and gold light as Naruto Uzumaki ambled home slowly, his clenched hands jammed deep in his pockets and his feet smacking loudly against the pavement, the only outward signs of his agitation aside from the scowl on his face.

The old hag had brushed him off yet again, despite his best efforts; to make matters worse, Sakura-chan had caught him coming out of her office and proceeded to yell at him for fifteen minutes straight for no good reason, ending her fit by going into a flood of tears so vast half of Konoha could have drowned in it. He hadn't even been able to say "sorry" or try and comfort her; Shizune-neesan had nipped that bud by hustling Sakura off and telling him, in a voice that crackled like lightning, to Get Out Or Else.

_Goddamn Sasuke-bastard, _ he thought, but there was no real heat behind the curse, just a thick, slow weariness that flowed through his body and shut down his mind.

He stayed lost in this cloud until his path brought him up one of Konoha's side roads, a place utterly unremarkable except for the small white building that had been built on one side a bit further up. There were no signs of habitation; the door was a thick slab of faceless steel and the windows were tiny spots of black glass, which neither gave light or reflected it.

For lack of anything better to do, he stopped and stared at it. Hinata had been taken, not into this particular building but one just like it, by ANBU the instant they'd arrived back at Konoha. He'd heard the little buildings were scattered all throughout the village, hiding secret tunnels and ANBU offices behind their blank white facades, but this was only the second time he'd noticed one. If Hinata hadn't vanished into one, he'd probably never have.

His mind drifted back to that day, a little unwillingly: Hinata, standing before him swathed in drab blue robes, an ANBU each clutching one of her skinny bird arms, as if they expected her to suddenly grow wings and fly; Hinata bowing deeply to him and Neji. _Thank you once again for my rescue. I can't thank you enough. Please tell Hanabi-chan that I'm all right -_-this to Neji. As the ANBU led her off to the dark steel door, she'd half-turned and looked back at him. She was trying to smile, but her mouth was shaking. _P-please don't worry about me, Naruto-kun. I-I promise you I'll be all right. _A second later, she was gone.

_What crap_ , he thought darkly, _treating Hinata like that. _

As the minutes ticked by, the traffic on the road became a little less; he guessed that most of the people were on their way home. At the other end of the road, in the opposite direction from the way most people were walking, a tall figure could be seen just coming around the bend, white robes fluttering in the evening breeze; it walked a few feet closer and Naruto recognized Neji Hyuuga.

To Naruto's surprise, Neji's walk stopped directly across from the ANBU building; moving off to the grass on the side, he dipped a hand inside his robes, which emerged holding what looked like a small woven mat. Placing it down on the grass, he arranged the mat so that it more or less faced the front door of the ANBU building and knelt, head down but back straight, so that he resembled a very stern mourning figurine. His eyes closed.

No one else seemed to give him a second glance, but Naruto's curiosity was threatening to burst him out of his skin."Oi, Neji!" he called as he jogged over to him. "Isn't this kind of a lousy place to meditate?"

One pale eye opened slowly, and Neji tilted his head slightly in Naruto's direction, which for Neji was the practical equivalent of a hearty handshake from anyone else. "If you knew anything about anything, you would know that it's actually quite beneficial for those who wish to master meditative techniques to practice them in highly trafficked areas. It helps build concentration." The eye slid shut and Neji turned so that he was once again facing the ANBU door dead on. "But I'm not here to meditate."

"Huh? Then for what?"

Something like a shiver, but softer, passed through Neji's body; both eyes opened now. "For the same reason that you were rooted to the ground over there a moment ago, I presume." He paused for a moment, the harsh lines of his profile easing until it was merely grim, and, Naruto thought, kind of sad."You were thinking about Lady Hinata."

'Well, yeah," he admitted, dropping down besides Neji. "I just can't stop thinking about it. It doesn't seem fair to me, locking her up again after we just got her free, you know? I mean, it's i Hinata /i . Just because Orochimaru got his snaky paws on her, they're treating her like she's booby-trapped. If it was something like that, shouldn't she have tried to take us out when we rescued her? She was fine! Scared, but fine!"

Well, fine, but slightly un-Hinata-like in the way she'd thrown herself in his arms, sobbing. _I...I never thought I'd see either of you again!_ She'd hugged Neji too, making him look (for nearly a minute, which had to be some kind of record in Naruto's mind) as if he'd washed his face in blood before he got himself under control again. The Hyuuga were not big on bodily contact outside of fighting.

"That doesn't matter," Neji said flatly, jerking Naruto's attention back to the present. "There are control jutsu that can be tripped from a distance, as well as myriad other ways she could have been compromised. It is Konoha policy for anyone, ninja or civilian, who has been in prolonged contact with any criminal above B-class level to spend at least a week in ANBU confinement, both for debriefing and to ensure that they haven't been "booby-trapped", as you so charmingly put it. There is no appealing this process, no matter the circumstances. We have little choice, but to grin and bear it."

The sun above them sank further into the night; to their right, the moon was just barely visible, the ghost of a pearl shielding herself with clouds. Naruto twirled a grass stem between his fingers, watching the little leaves spin out like the blades of a shuriken, back and forth and wondered if the lady in the moon ever looked down at Konoha, and if she was cold up there. "Yeah, I know, that's what you said when they took her away the first time. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and judging from your oh so subtle frowny face, you don't either--Hey!"

Neji had reached over and tapped Naruto's shoulder, all without looking or moving a body part other than his arm; the spot he touched immediately began to tingle with a numbness that shot down to Naruto's wrist and into his fingers. He dropped the grass stem and howled. "No fair! Damnit, Neji, no using the Gentle Fist just to get back at people! Cheater! Jerk!"

"Baby," Neji said, but he smiled, the gentler version of the superior smirk he had worn back in his asshole days (not, Naruto thought, that he had left those days all that far behind, the grinning bastard). Another touch, and the numbness receded away as swiftly as it had come.

They sat in silence for a while after that, each busy with his own thoughts, as the road emptied out and darkness fell completely. For some reason, Neji had activated his Byakugan; maybe he was paranoid about someone sneaking up on them after the Akatsuki attack, Naruto decided.

"Hey," Naruto said after nearly a half hour had passed. There was only so much sitting still and thinking that he could take and the scenery around them wasn't exactly fabulous. "How's Hanabi-chan?"

Neji had been sitting with his hand curled into cups on his lap, the picture of meditative ease; at Naruto's voice, his hands unrolled. "About as well as could be expected, given the circumstances," he replied tonelessly. "She will need several months of intensive physical therapy before she can even begin to use that leg normally again and there's no question of her being able to stay with her peer group in ninja training. Naturally, this has greatly upset her, and Lady Hinata's present confinement is not helping things." His fingers made a little play over the front of his robe, seizing invisible snags in the fabric. "Each day, she asks again if I've seen Lady Hinata and when she will come home, even though I've told her over and over that Lady Hinata must remain with ANBU for a week."

Naruto thought of Hinata's younger sister, who was even more silent than she, but from watchfulness instead of shyness; she nearly always had hair hanging over her eyes, a blind to hide the intensity of her silvery stare. Unlike Hinata, Hanabi rarely ventured outside the Hyuuga compound. Once, many years ago, Naruto had spotted her up in a tree not far from the Hyuuga borders, tucked away between two branches with a book and a sackful of apples by her side. She'd stayed up there until a cheerful, buxom woman came calling for her; then she'd shouldered the book and the apple sack (much flatter than it had been earlier) and jumped down into the woman's arms, allowing herself to be carried home as if she was a baby instead of a leggy girl of nearly six.

"I wish I could give her more concrete news, but Lady Tsunade refuses to tell me anything more than Lady Hinata was not physically damaged," Neji murmured. "Something that I could see for myself when we rescued her."

"Well..." _Should I tell him? He's not going to be too happy, but the old hag did say..._ Naruto wrestled with his inner debate for a minute, then decided that Neji could probably handle it. "I got a little more out of Granny Hokage than you did. She said Hinata seemed to be okay, but there was evidence of healed damage, and someone poking around in her chakra system and optic nerves, probably from Creepy Kabuto. But--" he continued hastily, spotting how Neji's face was beginning to twist, "it was nothing major and wouldn't give her any problems in the future. The only other thing was that there were real faint ligature marks on Hinata's neck. Like someone tried to strangle her."

Neji sucked air in. "_Ligature_ marks?"

He nodded. "Granny told me that Hinata said it was from Orochimaru."

"Ah." The word could have been a exhalation from a statue, so still did Neji sit, but his eyes were filled with an agonized fury. "I see. Well. You do have more of an "in" with the Hokage than I, after all. I appreciate you telling me this, Naruto."

His gaze drifted away then, towards the squat, pale, outline of the ANBU building; he whispered a word and the bunched veins of the Byakugan sprang up around his eyes once more. "Here's something interesting for you to know, Naruto. There's no one actually inside that building and it leads nowhere. It's one of ANBU's false fronts."

"What?" Naruto bounced to his feet in shock, staring first at the building, then at Neji's calm face, his faint smile. "We've been sitting outside a dummy building all this time for nothing?"

"Oh, I knew that even before I came here. ANBU can hide all it wants, but not from the Byakugan." He brushed his inky curtain of hair back with both hands, smoothing it out of the way, then turned to face Naruto squarely, all humor gone now. "It leads nowhere. But even so, the ANBU tunnels run beneath this road, as do their offices, holding cells, and...interrogation rooms."

It took a minute for him to digest this. "So," Naruto said slowly, "all this time you've been sitting here with your head down, you were looking at Hinata all along?"

"I wish," Neji said, his voice strangely fervent. "They're not entirely stupid; there are barriers over the more important rooms meant to cloud and confuse sight jutsu. I could just catch glimpses. But it's better than nothing."

He looked away, then added softly, "She's as well as could be expected, and her strength will bear her up past this. Orochimaru has nothing on Lady Hinata. Nothing."


	3. The Widening Gyre

_(Herein is the testimony of the Lady Hinata Hyuuga in the matter of her confinement with S-Class criminals Orochimaru and Kabuto Yakushi, taken on this day, the 31st of August, in the presence of Chief Interrogator Ibiki Morino and her Ladyship the Fifth Hokage, as well as miscellaneous ANBU personnel. All statements within have been sworn to be truth and nothing but truth. Let this stand as official record.)_

Hideki had been the first to notice the circle of birds in the sky.

It had been the boys' idea to race home, to see how fast and how quietly they could make themselves go sailing headfirst through the tangle of the Fire Country's native forests as they made their way back. Hinata, flushed with the successful completion of their mission and quietly grateful that everything had gone off without any problems, let them enjoy themselves as she followed a little ways behind.

Two genin on their first C-rank mission and her, assigned by Kurenai-sensei to lead and watch.

oooooo

"It's time you leaned how to lead a squad yourself," her teacher had told her when she'd called Hinata in to assign her the mission one winter morning.

"Don't misunderstand me," she'd added quickly, noticing the stricken expression starting to creep over Hinata's face. "I'm not dismantling Team 8. Never think that. However, while I'm incredibly pleased and grateful that you, Kiba and Shino are as close as you are, you do have a tendency to hang back and allow them to set the tone of your missions."

Kurenai-sensei rested her chin on her hands and gazed at Hinata, unblinking. Her voice was soft, but stern. "Hinata, this can't continue. I know it might not seem that important while you're part of your three-person squad, but it's absolutely vital to your development as a ninja that you learn to take charge and control people other than yourself.

Just for a moment, suppose you're part of a large, multi-squad mission in which the enemy manages to wound or wipe out most of the higher-ranking ninja, including, for the sake of argument, Shino and Kiba. You are one of the few left unwounded. Suddenly it's necessary for you to direct the survivors in their next action, whether it be retreat or a last-ditch attack." Her voice grew even softer, but no less hard. "As far as you've come, the way you are now, you probably would not be able to do that successfully, opening yourself to utter defeat."

Hinata bit her lip, and said nothing, unable to deny the truth of what her teacher was saying. Even with all her training and all the help'd she received from her friends--Neji, Hanabi, Kiba, Shino, everyone--there were still great gaps in her knowledge and skills, things that needed tending and practice.

She'd take up this challenge-- _the hardest yet, I think,_ she told herself silently--with the same unflagging devotion and care she had given the others; it was her vow and her dedication. She wouldn't disappoint Kurenai-sensei, who had been the first to really believe in her, even before Kiba and Shino, before Naruto had given her his whole-hearted endorsement and fully opened her eyes to the strength she held fast to inside her heart. If Kurenai-sensei hadn't given her those first small seeds of outside courage...

She would not disappoint herself.

Kurenai rose from her desk, and came around to where Hinata stood, placing both hands on the girl's narrow shoulders and squeezing gently. "You are wonderful at mastering yourself. Now, you must learn to stand on your own two feet and take entire responsibility for the lives of others as well."

In her teacher's eyes, Hinata could see the words left unspoken: _You will lead the Hyuuga someday; I know this. As Neji and Hanabi help protect you now, so must you be ready to protect them in turn when they need you. You must. You will._

oooooo

This new training was supposed to start out slow and small; take two genin on their first C-ranked mission and proceed from there. Shino had been called away to an important clan function for this first time, so it was only she and Kiba who waited for their assigned genin to arrive at Konoha's main gate that early morning. It was bitterly cold.

Kiba had grinned at her from atop Akamaru and shoved both hands deep into the pockets of his parka, his breath hanging cloudy in the greyish air. "Nice weather, isn't it? Say, you want to make a bet? Last one to get back with their team has to buy everyone else dinner at the Red Lotus Cafe." He freed a hand and wiggled the fingers at her in cheerful menace, while she warmed her hands in the soft fur behind Akamaru's floppy ears. "The _expensive_ Red Lotus Cafe."

"Kiba-kun," she'd protested, laughing, "your team only has to go a few hours away, while I have to take mine almost all the way across the Fire Country. That's not being fair."

He pouted, mockingly and Akamaru yipped something in response. "Aw. All you have to do is bring an ANBU outpost some not-terribly-important scrolls and enjoy the scenery while my team has to go bodyguard some minor lord's daughter at a party. We could be there for weeks, maybe, if they take a liking to us. Remember that story about how Kakashi-sensei took on that bodyguard job years ago and the old hag who'd hired him liked him so much she wouldn't let him leave?" He slapped his hand down on his leg for emphasis and said with slow, portentous gravity, "That...could be me this time. Or Akamaru, since we're really a package deal. You never know. Akamaru's a pretty awesome hunk of dog."

She was still laughing, doubled over and breathless, when their genin arrived, looking terribly small and young in the faint dawn light. They'd sorted out who belonged to whom, set down the terms of each mission and prepared to go; Kiba had leaned over and given her one of his fierce, one-armed hugs, something she'd only been able to return without freezing in panicked indecision within the last year or so. She'd put both arms around him in turn, her nose to the fur trim on his parka and smelled Kiba and Akamaru both, a clean, musky kind of smell. Then he'd left with a whoop and bound, and the last Hinata saw of him was the trees left swaying in his passing as his genin frantically tried to keep up with Akamaru's bouncing pace.

Her genin were two young boys named Hideki Totoyama and Yashino Takada, both genin for less then a year and veterans of ten D-ranked missions. Despite Kurenai-sensei's instructions and her own resolve, Hinata found herself in a nervous study for the first few hours of the mission, until she realized that both boys were more than slightly in awe of the Hyuuga Heir and just as frightened as she was.

After that, she'd swallowed down her fear and concentrated on showing them the ropes of the mission, which was not difficult, merely lengthy, and specifically designed to allow rookies to get a feel for the layout of the Fire Country, as well as learn to scout and judge terrain, something that Hinata was past mastery of. They'd had an uneventful trip out, made interesting by Hideki and Yashino's evident wonder and delight at being so far from home for the first time. The boys were quick-witted, obedient and eager to learn (though they persisted in calling her Lady Hinata, until she managed to get them to downgrade to "Miss"), and to her own mild surprise, Hinata found herself starting to relax and even enjoy herself.

They'd reached the outpost at sunset, making surprisingly excellent time for a mostly-rookie team and delivered their scrolls to the ANBU in charge, all without a hitch. After a short rest and a meal the next morning, they set off again, the boys in high spirits, she quietly happy with their good cheer and success.

Hours passed as they drew closer to home, and then Hideki noticed what even her sharp eyes hadn't.

"Look, Miss," he said, tugging at her sleeve as they stopped for a brief rest upon some branches. "Look at the birds. They're all flocking together like that...is something wrong?"

Hinata was leaning against the trunk, trying to catch her breath; her stamina, never the best, had improved greatly over the last few years, but too much exertion still left her paler than usual and panting. She simply hadn't been built with Neji's or Hanabi's energy reserves, but that didn't stop her from trying to push the border of her limits further and further with each try, grateful for even the tiniest bit of extra work she could scrounge from her body. It was always a struggle, but she liked it.

She glanced up, peering through the black lattice of branches over her head and saw the jagged wheel of birds hanging low in the somber winter sky. They swung clumsily around, dark bird-specks first scattering apart, then some diving, others flying in to fill the gaps that were left. Dozens dipped, flew down low and did not return.

Something on the ground attracting them...something that was most likely dead...

Her heart began to throb with quiet apprehension.

"Ma'am?"

"Ah, yes," she said; shaken out of her reverie, she called up the Byakugan. "Sorry. I suppose we should look, just in case."

They dropped to the ground and walked ahead quietly, Hinata in the lead; she judged from the birds' position and the glimpse she had gotten through the Byakugan that whatever it was they were seeking was no more than a ten minute walk to their west. She did not tell the boys that her look had shown her what looked like bodies scattered across the ground, or that they seemed to be human in form. Unconsciously, she spread her arms out a little as they walked, the better to shield them if whatever they sought turned out to be (as she feared) less than pleasant.

In a cleaning, under some wide-spreading oak trees, she found what the birds were so enamored of: the bloated bodies of three dead ninja.

oooooo

They stood in a rough line staring at the sight, as speechless as the trees that clustered around them, and even more unmoving.

The dead nin lay in a rough semi-circle of dark bloody earth, arms and legs askew, weapons dropped uselessly at the sides. Crows hopped neatly around and over the bodies, tearing free fleshy strips with their beaks, which they devoured whole and then set out for more. She had briefly turned off the Byakugan to conserve chakra as they drew closer; as far as she could tell they walked through a landscape empty of all life other than themselves and the birds. Now, looking at them with her un-enhanced vision, Hinata thought the men had to have been dead for at least a few days, probably more. There was no sign of who had ambushed them or why.

Yashino finally let out a soft, strangled cry and would have started forward if Hinata had not grabbed his arm. "But Miss, they're Leaf," he choked, pointing frantically at a bent and discolored head protector that was just visible through the ruin of one of the men's skulls. "They--they could be people we know! We have to see! Ma'am!"

"Be quiet," she whispered fiercely, and pushed herself a little more forward, trying to keep them away as they whimpered behind her. "We don't know what's happened here, it could be a trick or an ambush. Ninja don't rush into a situation without checking things out thoroughly first. You two stay back there and stay alert--I-I'm going to try and find out what's going on right now, if I can." She bought her hands up, made the quick sign, and whispered "_Byakugan!"_

The world shifted into a kaleidoscope of colored blotches, reds and yellows for heat, blues and greens for chill. The birds became a bobbing dance of crimsons and golds, while the bodies remained coolly blue, shading down to lavender and deep violet. Now she could see the wounds that lay on the corpses' surface, deep slashes and long stabs that had gone right through the top layer of fat and muscle in some places; curiously, from the placement, they all seemed to have been made vertically, while the victims were standing. There was no sign of anyone other than the birds, the bodies and her own small team for at least four hundred meters around.

"There doesn't seem to be anyone else around, " she started slowly, "but even so, what we should do is continue back--"

"Miss, if we don't so something right now, the birds will eat everything and there won't be any evidence left for ANBU," Hideki said, interrupting, and stepped past her, out into the clearing, making a move to shoo the birds away.

Hinata had only a fragmented memory of the next few minutes.

(This is all she remembers:

Hideki takes two steps forward, not even out from under the trees yet.

All the birds, as if in perfect agreement and understanding, lift away from the corpses and into the sky with one motion.

There is a soft thunk, and the cry of a child in pain: Hinata and Yashino look over just in time to see several kunai fly past and bury themselves to the hilt in Hideki's throat. They all stare at this, and at the growing puddle of blood on the ground before Hideki's knees fold under him and he tumbles to the forest floor.

One of the bodies shudders and heaves. An arm emerges, then another. Faces follow, with torsos, legs and feet attached, easily shrugging the split husks away. The newly born men bring their hands to their mouths and swallow; their bodies suddenly flare up with reds and yellows and greens.

She is the one who sees their faces and realizes with a dull thump of shock, that these men are from Sound and they are turning their way.)

Three Sounds, all in a row.

"Hmm, so I guess it really does work," the tallest of them said, his joints cracking as he rolled his head around on his neck. "I guess Little Boss'll be pleased, but shit! Hours crammed in a fucking Leaf corpse to ambush two fucking kids and a girl! When we get back I'm going to fucking take Andara's head. Bastard said it was going to be ANBU coming this way, not a bunch of goddamned kids."

_They tricked the Byakugan_ , she thought numbly, scarcely listening to him. _By lowering their body temperatures, stopping their chakra and vitals and sewing themselves into corpses. This is...like nothing I've ever seen...Who...who could..._

She stepped back a pace and collided with Yashino, who was shaking violently, fingers unsteady on his kunai; he'd already dropped several in his fright. Useless in a fight like this, but she could not blame him.

_Protect them when they need you._

"L-listen," she said as quietly as she could through chattering teeth and trembling lips. "I n-need you to get a couple of meters further behind me. You remember the other ANBU outpost, not far from here, that we passed on the way in, right? I'm going to use Protection of the Eight Trigrams and once I do, I want you to go. Start running for the outpost and d-don't stop. For anything. Just run."

Yashino moaned. "Miss, I can't--"

"Leave me behind and don't worry," she whispered. "I-I'll catch up, I promise." _These aren't good odds, but if we separate, there's a better chance that one will get away. This is the best and only way that I can see. I swore to myself and Kurenai-sensei that I would became someone capable of taking responsibility for other lives. _She choked back a sob, but tears ran down her cheeks anyway, leaving tiny ice trails on her skin. _Even if I failed Hideki-kun, I won't let Yashino-kun down as well. I won't let myself down._

_Even if I die here, I can say that I did this._

_I...don't want to die, though._

"Fucking kids," the Sound leader said again as he approached them. "I've got so many better things to do with my time then mess with ugly girls and stupid, senseless kids."

Behind her, she could hear rustling as Yashino got ready to flee for his life. Hinata waited until he was safely away, then dropped down into the stance for the Protection of the Eight Trigrams. _I wonder if I'll ever get to tell Neji-niisan if this new variant works as we planned, or if it was a complete failure._

_Please work._

"Kid's getting ready to run," one of the other Sound nin said, with a nod towards Yashino, his voice mocking. "You going to save him, girlie?"

"Don't recognize that stance, but them eyes...ain't that the Byakugan?" the third said, also moving to flank her and Yashino. "Don't matter though. I heard the only good one of the bunch was that Neji kid, and she ain't him."

Hinata could feel the slow roil of the chakra below her skin, waiting for release, and closed her eyes for a moment, steadying herself. "Run now," she said, eyes open once more, and felt her chakra snap out from within as she began to move through her attack. Yashino took off as if he was on fire, while the Sound nin froze in place, two to the right and the leader further left, kunai already lifted for attack.

Move closer together, oh move closer together, she begged silently.

They chose instead to test her barrier by hurling their kunai at her heart and head: each one struck the chakra wall that surrounded her with a sharp metallic crackle and fell to the ground, their points partially disintegrated. The leader's mouth dropped open, and worked in silent surprise for a moment, but he recovered all too quickly.

"All right, new plan: get after the fucking kid!" the leader yelled. "Bitch might be protected for now, but she can't last forever like this and she sure can't fucking move. The kid looks like an easy target, so go the fuck after him, Oboro, and take Mitsuda with you just to be sure he isn't hiding some crazy-ass bloodline too. I'll handle Byakugan here by myself."

The other two ninja nodded and began to move off in the direction Yashino had just taken, while the leader move forward and flipped a few more kunai at her, as if he thought he could startle her into dropping her shielding, and took a few more steps to the right, towards the other two.

_Now or never. Here I go._

Forcing almost the last of her chakra out of her reserves and holding it ready, Hinata waited until the two Sound nin had almost sprinted to the edge of the clearing before she gave her stored chakra a sharp push out towards the three ninja and dropped out of stance, ceasing the regular attack.

There was a sound like glass breaking and a brilliant explosion of light; she flung an arm up against her face for protection, but some of the light still seeped through, temporarily blinding her. She had extinguished almost of her chakra in order to explode the shield of the Protection from the inside out; theoretically it would both create a shockwave and send thousands of razor sharp shards of chakra flying at the enemy while giving her enough time to escape in the confusion. Though her body ached terribly from the sudden drain and her eyes were still dazzled, she turned and jumped for the nearest tree, catching hold of the lowest branches and slipping higher up into the tree's crown, stumbling once or twice, all grace gone along with her chakra.

When her vision cleared, she turned for just a moment to look back at her handiwork, and saw that one of the enemy nin lay unmoving at the very edge of the clearing, his body in bloody tatters. Next to him, the other Sound nin was moaning and trying to drag himself to his feet, arm hanging useless and smeared in crimson from hip to forehead on his left side. He shambled up and staggered forward, managing to make it to the trees at the edge and disappeared from sight into the shadows between them.

The leader stood very still and mostly unharmed; as she watched, he lifted an arm to rub it against his eyes, blinking and squinting through the dingy winter sunlight. Despite her weariness, she needed to seize the advantage, and so she turned and ran, leaping through the trees as quickly as she could under the circumstances.

_My chakra's almost all gone and he's barely even scratched...what should I do, what can I do..._

"Bitch!" The voice was much closer than she thought it should be and her heart, already saddled with enough fear and grief for a lifetime, gave a painful thump of warning in her chest. "Don't think you'll get away from me, bitch!" A series of sharp snaps behind her and a quick look gave proof to her fears; he was coming into the trees after her. "You fucking killed Oboro, and he was one of the few people I could stand in that goddamned place! Mark my words, I'm gonna make you scream for that!"

Hinata ignored him and tried to force more speed out of her flagging body. _I won't give up, not until the end. I won't--_

There was a sudden, sharp pain at her neck and her body went pins-and-needles, fingers and feet blurry at the edges. The world became a whorl of white light that stabbed into her mind, making her cry out; she missed the next jump, slipped and crashed down to the forest floor, landing in a cloud of dust and pine needles. She lay there stunned.

Laughter from above.

She managed to lift her hand high enough (_I'm so cold, why am I so cold..._) to brush it against the aching place on her neck, probed carefully, found a thin needle-like object sticking out. A crawling weakness swarmed through her mind, trailing darkness along with it; she put her hand down again, carefully. Her mind didn't want to hold more than one thought at once, but the one she had now was good enough, and she held it there as she reached for the small bit of chakra she had left.

"I bet you'll enjoy my poison," the voice said from very close by. "It's a unique blend known only to me. Completely original and with no known antidote. Not even Lord Orochimaru knows of its existence: the medic-nin who autopsy you are going to have a fine old time trying to figure out what the hell it is you died from. Even so," (she could tell from his voice that he was moving even closer) "you won't die for a little while yet...and I promised...to scream..."

Hinata could still feel a little sensation through the ice that seemed to coat her entire body, could still move her hands and access her tiny supply of chakra. So when she felt the hands that reached out to hurt her touch down, she was prepared and waiting.

He never expected her to grasp his wrist as he bent over her, gloating, never thought that Hinata still had some chakra left or that she regularly pushed herself above and beyond what her body expected of her, or that she'd taken note of his major tenketsu points when she first saw them in the clearing. She thought of those points, grabbed hold of him with all the strength she had left and shoved all of her remaining chakra into his system, letting it scatter where it would.

Screams and the wet that landed on her face told her that she'd been successful.

"My arm, " he moaned from a great distance, his voice tinny. "Oh, my arm. You goddamned bitch! Bitch! Ahhhhh---"

Still holding that one thought fast in her mind, she struggled to her hands and knees, then to her feet, and stumbled out of the clearing.

oooooo

She woke to shadow, to muted forest sounds and the faint touch of the air on her skin. Birds called dimly in the distance. It was very dark.

_There...aren't any birds that cry at night...here..._

Slowly, and with great effort, Hinata managed to raise a hand high enough to touch her eyes and verify that yes, they were open. Her hand dropped back into her lap.

_I'm blind. My eyes are open and I can't see. I'm blind._

The cracking of branches rubbing against each other. Birds. Small rustles that she hoped were animals. No screams on the wind. She patted the area around her gingerly, came up with nothing but dirt and empty air.

_No cover here. Have to...get away. Hide somewhere. Can't let myself be found..._

It was even more of an effort to get to her feet, but she managed, and took one tentative step, then another, hands outstretched and shivering. Save for the tender spot on her neck, she could barely feel her body any more, so heavy and swelling with ice was it; the spot alone beat with its own poisonous warmth, slowly drawing all of hers away into it, leaving frost in its wake. Jealous spot, stealing all the warmth for itself. Hateful spot.

She tripped over something that might have been a rock, then another thing that might have been a branch or a log and sat down hard, her back coming up against a tree. The husk of a thorn-bush touched her gently on the cheek, but it couldn't scratch her through the ice that coated her skin.

_I can't go on like this_, she realized. _I could walk right over the edge of a cliff, or even the edge of a riverbank and not know it until it was too late._

_For now, I guess I'll sleep._

She folded herself up as best she could, tucked her hands in her sleeves for a warmth she could no longer feel, and lost consciousness almost immediately.

oooooo

_Ah. I'm thirsty_.

Somehow, she realized it was raining-- _It's as cold as I am, but I can smell it, rain in winter, even Kiba-kun..._-- and dragged herself up for a drink. The icy water felt almost warm and gentle against her skin as she opened her mouth and tilted her head back to catch the drops on her tongue.

She lay quietly for a time afterwards, until the wind brought a new scent to her nose: thick and unpleasant, something that made her want to sneeze. Wet wool.

Footsteps in the dark.

"Hello," a voice said very softly from above. "What do we have here?"

Hinata immediately went still. Her heart, which to that point had been as frozen and sluggish as the rest of her, began to beat faster, sending little shoots of pain through her chest and limbs and she struggled not to cry out.

The crunch of footsteps moving towards her, now louder and more deliberate. Rough wet against her cheek, the hem of a cloak, or a sleeve, then fingers on her face, as hot as live coals, that melted the ice and brought pain and sensation back in its place. She tried twisting away.

"Well, you're not dead, though you certainly looked like it for a moment," the voice said pleasantly. It was young, male, good-natured, but that really meant nothing if she couldn't see his face.

The fingers touched her once more, turned her head to the side, making her whimper softly as the poison spot was moved. She waited until the hand retreated, then tried moving away again, but the poison burned in protest and overwhelmed her with dizzy heat. She fell back, her head coming to rest against a root.

The man tsked softly to her left. He was nothing more than a blot of warmth and a heavy scent in the darkness; the fingers reached out once more. "There's absolutely nothing to worry about. I'm a doctor. Let me help you."

He easily caught her weak attempts to push him away, holding her wrists fast in his warm fingers. "Now, now, don't struggle. I can't help you if you don't let me look."

"Please," she choked out. "You shouldn't...I can't..."

"Hmm," he said thoughtfully, completely ignoring her feeble protests. "Pulse slow and uneven. Labored breathing, dark streaks radiating out from that nasty red puncture wound on your neck...poison? I think so. You're also starting to show signs of hypothermia, by the way." His next words were quiet, reasonable and terrifying. "I'll have to take you back with me. Your condition is too serious for me to treat out here."

_Take me...where...?_

Hinata's head was suddenly very heavy, and her tongue thick. "Who--" she began and couldn't get the rest of the sentence out.

"You'll die," the man said simply in reply. She could feel him at her back and legs and hips, preparing to move her. "Do you want to die?" A hitch and she left the ground, borne up by nothing she could see, a jolt and a bounce. They were moving.

The next words came right by her ear. "I don't want you to die," the voice told her, breath ticklish. "Be strong. I know you can."

_Know...me...?_

Well, all right, Hinata thought, exhausted beyond all measure. She put her head down on what she thought was his shoulder and quietly passed out.

_(At this point, Lady Hokage called for an end to the testimony over the protests of Chief Morino, citing the Lady Hinata's face and concern for her mental state. After much heated debate, a rest period was granted by the Chief's permission. Questioning will resume at a later date--F.O.)_

oooooo

The boss had been gone for a damned long time already.

Nidon stamped his feet and exhaled hard, cold straight through to his guts. He was getting seriously bored out here in the elements and almost considered starting a game of cards to pass the time while the boss was away doing whatever it was he did to things that interested him. It would mean a harsh punishment if he was caught slacking, but it was taking the boss _so_ fucking long. You'd think he could finish things up at base instead of out in the great freezing open like this, but _no_, that's not good enough, he thought, and cursed under his breath.

Though, he thought with a sideways glance at Wakame, at least he hadn't been stuck with corpse duty this time. The fluids were already starting to seep through the heavy sacking, dripping into the dirt below while Wakame picked his nose, serenely oblivious to everything aside from himself. Some Leaf kid and two of their own, one in a lot of little pieces. The boss hadn't said anything though; just covered the kid's face, stirred some of their comrades's bloody pieces around with a stick--"Chakra burns?" he'd murmured--then ordered the whole kit and caboodle brought along.

Nidon had been ready to just write the whole thing off as routine bullshit, but then they'd found Togito lying gibbering in the earth a couple hundred feet back, missing an arm and alternating between cursing a "bitch" and wailing with pain. He'd been sent back to base with the third member of their happy group, while the boss had walked here and there, examined some little fiddly bits of broken twigs and tracks in the earth, then ordered them to stay there and vanished off into the trees. Togito's sobbing had echoed down the path for far too long until it died away.

Wonder who got him, he thought, and blew his dripping nose.

There was a rustle and crunch from somewhere ahead and he snapped to attention, as did Wakame, all thoughts of his nose apparently forgotten. The boss's mud-brown cloak could be seen flashing here and there through the trees, a dull springtime hue against the world's black and greys; then he was out, stepping forward with his bag slung awkwardly around his neck, and a small, blood-stained kunoichi cradled in his arms.

_Must be the bitch, I guess. Funny, she doesn't look like much..._

The boss was smiling, Nidon realized with a stab of apprehension; the girl was temporarily forgotten. No, that wasn't exactly true: the boss was always smiling, but everyone in Otogakure learned to read the degree of his smile, the tilt of his head and the way his eyes widened or narrowed real damn quick unless they liked being up shit creek without a paddle. Hell, he'd seen the boss take down a spy from Iwagakure once on Lord Orochimaru's orders, and he'd smiled all the while as he did so.

Nidon still replayed that scene occasionally in his nightmares.

This wasn't a smile, he realized to growing unease; it was a grin. A grin like someone had come down off the clouds and given the boss everything his heart (if he had one) could possibly desire, and some stuff that he didn't even know he wanted until he got it to boot. It was one of the most fucking frightening things he had ever seen in his life.

Then he got closer to them, and the grin faded, to be replaced by his more usual blandly pleasant expression, but Nidon could still see the grin lurking around in the corners of his eyes.

"You want me to carry her, sir?" Wakame rumbled, startling him out of his thoughts; he pushed the corpse bag aside with a wet squelch and held out his big ham hands for the girl.

"No, no," the boss said politely. "She's a delicate case and might need immediate attention before I can get her stabilized back at base. I'll handle things for now."

The girl really didn't look like anything special, Nidon thought, staring at her as they walked. Short, skinny (big breasts though, he noted) snarled dark hair, pale as snow (though that could be from her injuries, he reasoned). There was one hell of a poison mark on her neck though, and the small hand dangling at her side was bloody to the wrist, but with no cuts that he could see. Then she was shifted, and he found himself looking straight into the shiny lenses of the boss's round glasses, and the deceptively clear grey eyes behind them. His own face, caught in miniature within the boss's eyes. A tremor slipped through him.

"Something the matter, Nidon-kun?" the boss asked calmly, over the top of the girl's head.

"No, sir," he said, carefully taking stock of every little motion he made, every gesture, every word. "Nothing, sir."

They walked the rest of the way back in silence.


	4. Paper Cranes

It was almost like deja vu, Kabuto thought absently as he bore Hinata Hyuuga back towards Otogakure with him, her body a soft cold weight in his arms. Another time, years and another lifetime ago, when he had carried a badly wounded kunoichi away for healing, only to leave her behind on the stadium's stone floor when duty called.

_This time, however, the story ends a little differently_ , he decided, and bit back his grin.

The rain had stopped some time ago and a few rays of pale light were attempting to touch the earth before they vanished with the setting sun. One lit and silvered the fence surrounding Otogakure's latest incarnation, an ancient abbey left abandoned to the elements countless years back, a building half fallen into piles of crumbling mortar and twisted vegetation and surrounded thickly by trees.

The guards on duty waved them though as they passed; in the distance, Kabuto could see Yamada was waiting for them at the entrance to the medical wing, his bony shoulders slouched against the wooden frame of the door. Face screwed up into a tremendous frown, he alternated between checking his watch, picking at his cuticles and running a finger over the newly erupting spots that blanketed his cheeks.

"We're late, I know," Kabuto said, making Yamada jump and curse with the sudden realization he had company. "Sorry about that. I found quite a surprise laying in wait for me and ended up taking longer than I thought."

Yamada shook his head, sending his lank hair flying, and muttered something Kabuto couldn't quite catch as he held his hands out for Hinata: then he saw the forehead protector still hanging round her neck and dropped his hands.

"I wouldn't have let you take her anyway," Kabuto told him pleasantly. "And the next time I catch you off your guard, you can do night soil duty with Samenari-kun. Age is no excuse for stupidity."

"Huh," Yamada said, with a shrug and an expression that hovered on the brink of utter indifference, and Kabuto wondered again where a thirteen year old ninja of no particular talent got his attitude from. Yamada made such a show of being utterly incompetent that Kabuto had moved him to the medical service where he could keep an eye on him, and quietly had him watched while he was off-duty as well, the memory of another ninja who had suppressed his considerable talents to present the face of a failure to the world uppermost in his mind.

Now he watched the younger boy, who was studying Hinata intently, his lips pursed in disapproval or disgust. "A Leaf-nin, sir?" Yamada's clan had borne some unspecified but deeply felt grudge against Konoha, and the teenager's face lit with a sullen joy every time they brought back a Leaf as prisoner, his expression all but begging that he be allowed to help with the experiments; Kabuto continually disappointed him by insisting that he keep to his role as orderly instead. "Please tell me she's meant for the new experiment."

"She is not," he replied blandly, and smugly watched the gleam vanish from Yamada's eyes. "She's a very special research subject, but she's also badly wounded and in need of immediate care. I need you," he said, slipping the keys for the building out of his pouch, "to go open room one for me, get my other bag of supplies out of room six, and find a robe or something for her to wear. She can't stay in these filthy clothes."

Yamada took the keys with limp fingers, snarled something under his breath that sounded like "fine, fine," and began to walk away.

"Oh, and Yamada-kun?"

He waited until the teenager had turned around to smile at him, the slow, wide smile that instantly caused gazes to drop and people near him to find excuses to be elsewhere.

For all his posturing, Yamada-kun was no exception: the boy's eyes widened until he could see all around the black ring of his irises.

"No one touches her, except for me. No one goes near her, except for me, or Lord Orochimaru, should he deem her worthy of his interest. No "accidents", no poisons, no mysterious seizures. Disobey and you'll watch the next set of experiments from the vantage point of the dissection table. The same goes for anyone else in this compound. Am I perfectly clear?" He'd already lost a number of very promising test subjects because some idiots had decided that settling their petty scores was more important than their service to Lord Orochimaru, forcing him to implement extreme measures to keep future incidents from taking place.

As for the ones who had already sinned, Orochimaru cared little about what actually went on during the experiments he did not personally supervise, trusting that Kabuto would produce the results he expected and wanted, whatever the means.

One pair of hands was as good as another, after all.

oooooo

Room One sat open and waiting when he finally stepped inside, everything exactly as he had asked. The robe Yamada had brought was spread out over the bed, but he put Hinata down carefully on the floor instead and bent to check first the bed, then the robe, running a hand over the bedding, rubbing the material of the robe roughly between his fingers to check for ground-in powders and searching carefully around the seams, eyes open for anything sharp or bright. He found nothing but plain bedding and heavy cotton and so reset everything on the bed, murmured "Good boy," and turned his attention back to Hinata Hyuuga.

The Hyuuga Heir was a sorry-looking sight indeed, sprawled limply on the floor with limbs askew in all directions, paler than rice paper, her clothes clotted with mud and blood, and a thousand twigs snarled in her hair. Her lips were still slightly blue. He took her pulse again, shook his head, sent her deeper into the coma.

With Hinata safely unconscious, he could began the real work. Checking his medical bag to make sure the that ink and brushes were packed inside for any seals he might need to draw, he slipped a arm under her back and lifted her just enough that he could remove her thick overcoat, made heavier by the rain and mud that had soaked and settled into it. Tossing it aside for later burning, he started to pick apart the water-swollen knot of her forehead protector, cursing softly when the fabric refused to yield to his quick fingers. He settled instead for slicing it apart with a spare scalpel, and dropped it into his medical bag, where it sank with a soft _clunk_ among the rest of his instruments.

The spot where Togito's attack had hit home now lay bare, a whorl of red and black shouting out from her waxen skin. Kabuto touched the puncture wound delicately, then lifted his hand, sketching the lines from the poison in the air above her throat. _Tricky, tricky thing. As awful looking as that wound is, it doesn't even begin to approximate the internal damage. And if the poison's settled in her eyes..._He snorted, very softly. _You have a horrible tendency towards serious injury, Miss Hyuuga. Lucky, isn't it, that I'm alway there to catch you when you fall?_

He had just removed her boots when he remembered that he hadn't put out water for cleaning the surface dirt off her body and felt a small pulse of annoyance shoot through him at the lapse. It took a moment of searching the storage closets in the room before he found a wide, heavy bowl and a few rags that would do; he filled it from the tap in the bathroom, laid it out by the bed and resumed stripping away her filthy clothing.

Her inner layers were remarkably dry, save for where the rain had managed to get in under her collar and hem and mostly free from the mud that had coated her on the outside, but her body still bore the marks of Togito's attacks: scattered plum-colored bruises, cuts and scrapes. Several areas were sticky with blood and tried to take her skin along with the cloth when he attempted to remove it from her body, but a few passes with a water-soaked rag took care of that little difficulty..

A bath for her, he thought, as soon as possible.

Putting the dirtied rag aside, he reached for a clean one and wiped the blood off her right hand, rinsing until the water ran clear, then took it--even if one of his credos was _Never underestimate your opponent_, so small to cause such gruesome damage; Oboro had been left in chunks, not a single section bigger than a loaf of bread--in his own and bent her palm upward, uncurling her fingers. He saw blackened skin at the tips, fading down to fierce red streaks that ran the length of her fingers , a cloud of tiny blisters on her palm; everything, in short, that he had expected to see. _Chakra burns. She couldn't control it well enough and it partially rebounded on her. My, my, Miss Hyuuga. In the future, you'll have to be more careful._

"Though, I suppose I can't really fault you," he said out loud as he pulled the robe off the bed and arranged it over the floor so she could lay upon it, guiding her limp arms through the sleeves. "Life and death situation and all."

Once Hinata was arranged to his satisfaction, he settled himself in a comfortable position at her head, reached out, and lightly pressed his fingers against her temples. His eyes shut, he pushed tiny threads of his own chakra through her skin, felt it settle down into the paths that wound under his fingers. Chakra had a tendency to naturally pool in any place in the body that was damaged; with her own sealed away, his would slip into her system in its place, free to roam her body's pathways without interference, catching and snagging on anything that was unnatural or out of balance within.

He didn't wait long for results. The picture his chakra spun in his mind's eye was of lacy black strands of corruption tattooed against the healthy red of living tissue, studded here and there with chips of poison that lay glittering in her bloodstream like shards of green ice. It was just as he'd feared; the poison had concentrated itself above her throat, submerging itself in the blood-vessels of her skull and winding a path along through her optic nerves, poised to attack her brain once her heart beat freely again.

But what was this? Here and there a sharp yellow energy gleamed faintly among the poisonous green; dissipating chakra that didn't belong in her system. He knew that Hinata's chakra shone a cool lavender blue, his own a bright reddish shade, so someone else had mixed in their chakra as well. And only in the areas with the poison.

_Well. Not only have I caught my poison thief, it took me all of two minutes to figure out your pet masterwork, Togito-kun. Bless that fool's luck of your while you can, because if the cold hadn't slowed down the advance of the poison, I'd be sawing off the top of your skull with a rusty scalpel right about now._

Unfortunately while the technique might have been simple and obvious, ridding her of its effects was going to be a much more complicated trick. He had antidotes, but they would have to be tailored to the poison's unique blend, which would take more time than he was comfortable spending. The other option were seals and using a healthy portion of his own chakra to bind the poison molecules and lift them out of her system; a long, slow, backbreaking process, but quicker then trying to reverse-engineer Togito's poison. Seals it was.

Stretching and cracking his fingers, he decided that he might as well check on any injuries she had below the neck while he had the chance, and pulled his chakra into his right hand. Brushing it lightly over her collarbone, he felt down both shoulders, then lifted her into a sitting position and ran his fingers down over her spine, tracing the muscles of her back. He found and noted a pulled muscle lower down on her right side, then carefully set her down again and laid both hands over her heart. Only by searching very closely could he find the tiny, almost non-existent traces of the damage he had healed for her three years ago; everything else seemed normal, aside from two broken ribs. Just for fun, he pushed lightly at her trapped chakra, testing it, and was rewarded with a surprise.

Despite appearances and despite all evidence to the contrary, Hinata Hyuuga had a much larger chakra capacity than he would have given her credit for. Which meant either his information was out of date (in his opinion, extremely unlikely; he just didn't make mistakes like that) or she wasn't able to completely utilize it to its full potential and so looked far weaker than she really was. His answer came after a little more prying: some of her chakra pathways seemed to be malformed in such a way that she couldn't have used her full capacity, even if she wanted to.

"Interesting," he pronounced and sat back on his heels, gazing thoughtfully at her. _This is nothing more than educated guesswork of course; without something like the Byakugan, which makes all of the hidden paths visible and traceable, the best I can do is merely speculate as to the cause and the extent of the damage. However, there are only two things I know of that could permanently erode a person's chakra paths like that: severe early illness and/or chakra-related accidents...or deliberate mutilation._

_Do they know? _he thought, studying the pale curve of her cheek, her delicate face and tiny hands. _Do they know and not care?_ Probably the latter. Power was power, and someone who didn't have it--even if it was through no fault of their own--was simply worthless in the world the Hyuuga moved in. Worthless too, in eyes of many ninja.

But worth and power came in many different forms, and it was never wise to set just one on a pedestal above the rest. Lives were so easily lost that way.

Two of the fingers on her left hand had been broken at some point and reset sloppily, in such a way that she'd lost a little functionality. He swallowed a sigh, re-broke and reset them so they would heal properly this time, then returned to her torso and moved down. Digestive organs, fine; reproductive organs normal, hips were both in line and undamaged from her fight. Her upper thighs were speckled with bruises and scrapes, but nothing major; reaching her left knee, he found a torn ligament and signs of blunt trauma to the kneecap, probably from the fall she'd apparently taken while fighting Togito. Hairline fracture of the tibia in her right calf. Tissue damage in both feet. All could wait.

Lifting her to the bed, he thought of the patterns he would need, the seals for stability and healing, countersigns against poison, blindness, pain. Once she had been settled in, he reached for his brush and ink, bent and moved all the things on the floor up to higher places, and began to draw.

oooooo

Kabuto had just finished painting the seals on Hinata when he felt something cold just touch his face: the flicker of Orochimaru's presence moving towards him slowly. He shook his head in wry amusement as he brushed a final character into place on her collarbone, fighting down a touch of disgust as well. _Right on time, half an hour early. You're very clever, my lord, but not quite good enough. _

No matter how hard he tried to disguise it, to shove it down and project sly harmlessness, Orochimaru could never fully suppress the aura that hovered around him like a palpable shadow, touching everything he passed with a chilly darkness that seemed to sap away life. For some reason (and in certain moods), Orochimaru seemed to make a game out of this suppression of self, and would try to slip up on Kabuto unnoticed at every opportunity. It had never once worked.

_As if I didn't spend hours wallowing in his presence, or imbue myself with every detail, every piece of knowledge about himself and his body. Honestly._

He sat back on his heels for a moment, admiring his work. Across the floor ran tight black spirals that swung out like furled petals from the center where Hinata lay, daubed so thickly with ink that only tiny patches of her white skin showed through, scattered stars in a midnight sky. He'd even painted her eyelids and the shell of her ears with tiny graphs, leaving no place uncovered, nothing to chance. Something about the way she looked, lying there in rigid serenity with her white robes and blackened skin, reminded him of a picture he'd seen once in a book, an old woodcut illustration depicting a sacred temple virgin lying stiffly before a priest after a ritual exorcism. He chuckled low in his throat at the thought, and removed a bit of twig that still clung to her hair. It was ruining the effect.

The cold in the room deepened, despite the efforts of the coal brazier in the corner: Orochimaru was drawing closer by the second. With one hand, Kabuto re-wet his brush in the dish of ink; with the other, he tugged the neckline of her robe together to make it a little more modest, careful not to smear his seals. By the time Orochimaru actually opened the door to the room, Kabuto was already starting to back out through the clear path he'd left himself in the pattern, filling in the breaks as he moved away.

"Don't come any closer, my lord," he said without bothering to turn around or lift his head. "You'll smear the mandala.The ink's not quite dry."

To his well- hidden relief, Orochimaru simply made a noncommittal "hn" in response, and stayed where he was. That meant he was in a good mood, he mused silently as he finished up the remaining characters; _Sasuke-kun must have been performing very well today._ If the fancy struck him, Orochimaru was perfectly willing and able (and had in the past) to destroy things _he_ considered trivial merely for the fun of watching them break and hang the consequences, all in the name of the chaos he held so dear. After all, it wasn't _his_ personal research that was being meddled with and loyal Kabuto would always step in and silently restore matters to the way they were each and every time.

It really was, Kabuto thought sourly, a very tiresome and inefficient way of doing things.

"So," Orochimaru rasped after a short silence. "Yamada-kun told me a great thing had happened, drawing all your attention, but all I see is a pathetic little girl lying like a corpse before me."

"Not a pathetic little girl, my lord," Kabuto corrected gently, with a smile. "A pathetic little Hyuuga." He turned to face Orochimaru and let his grin fill out and deepen. "And not only a Hyuuga, but _the_ Hyuuga. Lady Hinata, the current heir. It's remarkable. Almost a miracle."

"Hyuuga?" Orochimaru repeated, finally beginning to show a touch of interest. "Oh, yes, the Byakugan. Arrogant trash, worthless save for their carefully hoarded bloodline limit." He frowned suddenly, as if brushed by an unpleasant thought. "My dear boy, this is all very well, but with Sasuke-kun and his Sharingan ripening so beautifully on the horizon, I hardly need another eye-based bloodline limit at the moment." His frown changed into an amused, tolerant smile. "After all, I'm not going to abandon my precious Uchiha-in-waiting for that miserable stick of a girl, Heir or not. She looks as if a strong wind would break her."

"Well, she endures yet. Besides, if you truly wish to learn every jutsu in the world, you'll need the Byakugan at some point, my lord," Kabuto reminded him as he stepped outside and placed a hand on the door to draw it shut behind him. He snatched one last glimpse at Hinata, but she remained the unmoving center of her black and white world as the door swung shut before his eyes. "The Sharingan may be able to copy the Kaiten to an extent, but you'll need the Byakugan to successfully utilize the Gentle Fist style and any other hidden Main House techniques; I've heard rumors that there are quite a few. Unsealed Hyuuga don't grow on trees, my lord. I can't emphasize it enough, but this is a rare opportunity that should not be squandered."

"So you say," Orochimaru replied, which in Orochimaru-speak typically meant _I'll agree for now,_ and tilted his head in such a way that strands of his long black hair fell against Kabuto's arms. When he failed to move away, Orochimaru rolled his eyes skyward and smiled faintly. "But then again, you've always been so very interested in people with bloodline limits, almost obsessed in a way, haven't you, dear Kabuto? I suppose I can indulge you, since it will benefit me in the end anyway."

Kabuto sighed, partly from real sorrow. "One of my true regrets is that Kimimaro fell ill before I could really start to study his bloodline, and now the Kaguya are extinct," he murmured, setting the lock on the door with his own chakra to dissuade the curious and the vengeful, like Yamada. Just to be absolutely certain, he fetched a roll of paper usually meant for scrolls, laid it out in strips against the doorway, then signed his name across the pristine surface with a flourish, mute warning that the contents of the room belonged to him and him alone. This done, he turned to Orochimaru. "Would you care to join me for some lunch, my lord? Nothing fancy, I'm afraid," he added, as if Orochimaru wasn't on a special, strictly-controlled and scheduled diet supervised and prepared entirely by himself. A snack probably wouldn't hurt though, he decided. "I usually just make some noodles."

"You're leaving her all alone now, after all that work? Heartless Kabuto."

He shrugged a little, as if Hinata Hyuuga meant less to him then the noodles. "I can't work on an empty stomach, especially when I'm going to be using huge amounts of chakra on her later. It won't matter if I leave her for a while; she's literally in a sleep on the edge of death and won't rouse until I wake her. The poison is in suspension along with her body. It can't do any further damage at this time."

_So I think_.

oooooo

"By the way," he added as they walked to the little kitchen that only he, Orochimaru and Sasuke had access to, "there's another reason to be grateful to that girl. Without her, we wouldn't have learned that someone's been developing jutsu in secret."

He noted the way Orochimaru went rigid at these casual words with a twinge of pleasure: it was exactly the reaction he'd calculated his sentence to produce. It was one of the few hard-and-fast rules in Otogakure that anyone who managed to develop an original jutsu had to immediately bring it to Orochimaru's or Kabuto's notice, so that their lord might claim it for his own. Anyone who deviated from this edict would be swiftly and hideously punished. Though, that never stopped some from trying to bend the rules, convinced that they and they alone were brilliant and stealthy enough to hide from Orochimaru's gaze. The lure of being that "one" had really ruined a lot of otherwise promising Sound nin, he thought. Not that he really cared.

"Who?" Orochimaru finally snapped. "How?"

"Togito-kun," he admitted, unlocking the kitchen door. "It was rather clever, really; he found a way to somehow encase a poison of his own blending in a sort of chakra-shell. Injected into the victim, it could lay dormant for weeks, months, maybe even years if he so chose, until he snapped the shell and let the poison flood the victim. Double damage from both the chakra and the poison, potentially. A nice little trick for assassination."

"I'll kill him myself."

"Don't just yet," Kabuto admonished, taking down the bowls and pots needed to cook and setting them out on the counter. "Remember how I told you that some of the poisons from the general cabinet had been going missing these last few months? We now have both our culprit and a list of the poisons he took for his blend. An evidence trail so blatant a blind man could follow it. However," he added as he lit the stove and put water on for the noodles and into the kettle for tea, "if he was really clever, he would have taken from the ones he didn't use, just to throw me off track." Orochimaru still looked murderously unconvinced, so Kabuto hastened to add: "I'm sure I can reconstitute the poison from whatever samples I can pull out of Lady Hinata, but it may take too much time, and frankly, I have better things to do--" The kettle let out its cricket whine, interrupting, and he lifted it off the flame.

"I'll get the information out of him," he finished, and slanted his eyes at Orochimaru knowingly as he poured the bubbling water over the pale brown tea powder in his cup. "You needn't trouble yourself about it."

Orochimaru unbent enough to laugh as Kabuto placed the bowl of noodles in front of him before serving himself, languidly propping his chin on one hand. "Whatever would I do without you, my precious boy?"

You'd have died a few times over by now, probably, Kabuto thought, and took up his chopsticks.

His lunch companion toyed with his own bowl of food while Kabuto ate steadily, leaving the tea aside to cool. Occasionally, he would take a tiny bite of the food before ignoring it for long stretches of time where he did nothing more than stare across the table at Kabuto, who was long accustomed to this type of scrutiny and paid it no mind. Finishing his noodles and placing the empty bowl aside, Kabuto took out his info cards--still a vital resource for him--and shuffled around for the section on the Hyuuga.

"What are you doing?" Orochimaru asked with a raised brow. "Fiddling with your cards again?"

"Refreshing my knowledge on the Hyuuga girl," he replied, as if he hadn't committed every detail about her to memory long ago. "Did you deal much with the Hyuuga when you were in Konoha, my lord?"

Orochimaru's expression darkened immediately at the simple question. "Only with that wretched Hinako," he growled, naming Hinata's almost legendary great-grandmother. "Despite her age and decrepitude, that did not prevent her from meddling in my affairs. Always asking awkward questions. Never showing the proper fear and respect a hag of her advanced years should have shown. In short, she was...a nuisance."

Meaning that she actually gave him some trouble, Kabuto translated, and nodded with just the right degree of understanding. "Well, Lady Hinata is nothing like the woman she was almost undoubtedly named for. Pity. I suppose they were hoping for another Hinako, but instead they got one of the weakest Hyuuga in the clan's history." His voice and smile held just a touch of smug superiority. "It's funny, in a way. The Hyuuga seem to have some genetic quirk that ensures they almost always bear male children first, yet on the rare occasions a female is born first, they're always very formidable: Lady Hinako and her sister before her, for example. And then Lady Hinata comes along and ruins the system, " he finished, sighing lightly in mock sorrow. "Poor things. It almost makes me feel sorry for them."

"Weak, is she?" Orochimaru murmured, in a way that would have suggested to most people that he hadn't really been listening to anything Kabuto had just said. "Are you certain?"

"As the sky is blue, my lord."

That brought him a smirk and a short hiss of laughter. "The sky is quite capable of changing its hue, my dear. Perhaps," he added in the silky tone that came forth whenever he was couching orders as suggestions, "you should torture her, just to make sure. _Never underestimate_. Isn't that what you always say?"

One by one, Kabuto slipped cards free and laid them out in a neat box on the table in front of him, temporarily ignoring the remark. Hinako Hyuuga. Her son Hiraki, architect of his twin sons' tragedy. The twins Eiko and Aiko, Hiashi Hyuuga's aunts, exempt from the fate that had befallen him and his twin because they'd had the good luck to be born after the Heir. Their younger brothers Hiyoshi and Hiyashi. Setsuna, technically Hiashi's aunt but nearly the same age, product of her father's late second marriage; the family medic and a very frightening lady. Hiashi himself and his two dead brothers, Hizashi and Hiroshi. His younger sister Reiko, gone to the Branch House to be with her children, worthless now. Neji Hyuuga's solemnly angry face. Hanabi Hyuuga' small round one, blank as the moon. Hinata. He placed a finger on this last card and drew it towards him.

"Waste of time and effort, my lord," he finally replied with a decisive shake of his head. "Unless she misbehaves, I have no reason to torture her. I need her intact physically in order to successfully conduct my research; that should be obvious."

A twitch developed in Orochimaru's smooth white face; dispassionately, Kabuto watched it jump. "Do you think me stupid? I wasn't merely thinking of physical torture; you don't need her sanity intact to experiment on her, now do you? A little mental pressure, applied skillfully, should make her very sweetly complaisant."

The idea that Hinata Hyuuga had ever been anything other than sweetly complaisant startled a laugh out of him, but he quickly subdued the reaction down into a more neutral and controllable smile."My lord, I'm sorry to have to disagree again, but allow me to explain why that wouldn't work either."

With a raised finger, he began to tick off the reasons. "First off, psychotic people are also dangerously unpredictable people, and I am neither stupid enough nor smug enough to put myself in a situation where Hinata Hyuuga could potentially become a threat to me. That, and I don't need yet _another _thing to worry about on top of all the other matters I have to contend with. Secondly, she might be physically frail, but I strongly suspect that mentally breaking her would take more work than I'm willing to put in right now." He tapped her card and lifted his eyes to Orochimaru's glittering golden ones, utterly serious for once. "When you have someone whose father was emotionally abusive towards her for nearly all of her short life, culminating in him saying--to her face and in front of others--that her entire family would be better off if she were dead--what more could you possibly do to her? Anything I could say to her, she's very likely heard it all before. At home."

Not to mention that anyone who suffered through that kind of home atmosphere and yet still retained a gentle disposition, loving heart and enough mental strength to continue to push herself forward despite being judged as worthless by nearly everyone around her was someone with a inner fortitude made of solid steel, or perhaps diamond. There were ways she could be gotten to, namely through her friends and family, but she wasn't here for that and Kabuto had enough to do already without indulging Orochimaru's whims for destruction, _just because_.

Someday he'd spend a nice, long, slow time probing for the source of Hinata's inner strength, but not right now. "Besides, I don't think you quite grasp what an asset she might be to our experiments. Physically, her weakness just makes her even more perfect for my research. It's like starting from point zero, building from the ground level up. Not only that, the Byakugan can be used for so many other things: chakra research, tracking--"

He was starting to babble, he realized with a twinge of alarm, and took a drink of tea to try and cover the break in his sentence. It was still too hot and he coughed violently, running his tongue against the burnt spot on his lip. _Damnit._

The Sannin's lips twisted up into an arch smile, earlier storms forgotten as he drank in Kabuto's unusual display of emotion; silently Kabuto cursed himself. He really should have known better: Orochimaru savored any moment that Kabuto's mask slipped even slightly. But at least it would distract him from the subject of torture, he thought, and if he played things right, Orochimaru might decide the whole exchange was merely one of his games anyway. "Why, my darling Kabuto, I haven't seen you this animated since I got you that new scalpel set. In fact, I might even call you...excited." Now carefully blank-faced, Kabuto merely nodded in response and blew gently on his tea to cool it; a rather gauche move, but Orochimaru was hardly someone for whom the term _class_ held any meaning.

"I'll admit, your behavior has given me concern a time or two," his lord and master continued sedately. "You don't drink, you don't wench (or chase the boys) and aside from the occasional test foray or soldier pill, you don't even seek relief through drugs. Work, work, work, and no play. It was almost...worrisome. But I see now my worries were all for naught." He sighed theatrically, the low sound of a lover scorned. "I suppose there comes a time in every young man's life when he finds himself yearning for an underling of his own; it was bound to happen sooner or later." He paused to judge the effect of his words on his audience; getting nothing but a smile in response, he then added casually, "You may sleep with her, if you like," as if the matter was entirely in his power to decide.

_Oh, as if I'd give you that much of an opening to work with, my lord._ Out loud he said, "You know the reason behind my reticence as well as I do, my lord: it scarcely needs to be talked of. As for the girl, well, my research comes first, before anything else. And to be honest, she really isn't my type."

Orochimaru smiled slowly in reply, the tip of his tongue just wetting his lower lip, then stood up and reached out for him. His cool hand brushed Kabuto's cheek with a touch that was probably meant to be affectionate: he sat and smiled and endured it. "You look almost saintly when you lie, Kabuto, but that's only because you do it so well. Though, if she's trouble," the older man continued coolly, all tenderness gone, "I expect her to be dealt with as strictly as anyone else, precious research subject or no. I'm allowing you this license Kabuto. Don't disappoint or fail me. If she becomes a liability, you'll destroy her with your own hands."

Kabuto ran his fingers along the edge of Hinata's card, then held it up in front of him, considering what needed to be updated, what needed to stay. "I plan on wringing every last drop of worth out of her that I can," he said softly. "You have no idea what use she can be to us."

_And maybe, just maybe_, he thought to himself as Orochimaru left the room, _I'll finally have someone to talk to around here who _isn't _a raving lunatic._


	5. Snake Pit

Author's Note: First, I'd like to thank all my reviewers: I really appreciate everyone's thoughts and feedback. It makes me very happy to know that people are enjoying this story and I'll try my best to keep the quality as high as possible.

Second, just a note on the use of honorifics: Hanabi calls Hinata "Ane-ue" which is a slightly archaic and very formal way of saying "older sister". In canon, Hanabi uses the "ue" forms, (she calls Hiashi "Chichi-ue"/Father) while Hinata uses "-sama" forms (Hiashi is "Otousama")—same formality level, but slightly less stiff. 

oooooo 

Hinata lay, and dreamed a dream.

She was kneeling in the dirt in one of the side-gardens at the compound, weaving a fortress together out of sticks as the bright noonday sun beat down upon her shoulders. A short distance away Hanabi crouched, arranging her soldiers into neat formations, ranked by size, her painted queen clutched in her hand.

_Ane-ue, are you almost done?_

_Just a minute._ Her own queen was waiting patiently at her side, loyal guardsman clustered all around her, a lady smiling serenely within a thicket of glittering metal points.

_Ane-ue?_

Nurse and Auntie Den watched from the veranda, smiling indulgently, baskets of peas to be shelled in their hands. She wiped one drop of sweat away, then another.

_It's so hot, Hanabi-chan._

"I know."

The sun had grown enormous, blotting out the entire sky and every inch of her skin felt as if it was on fire. Hinata looked up, blinking away tears from the overwhelming light.

_It's too hot..._

"Shush." A cool hand stroked her forehead, brushing away tears. "It's all right. Everything will be all right. You're just running a little fever, that's all."

She was ill in bed. Was that all? Auntie Den sitting at her side, soothing her with damp rags and sweet tea brewed with herbs. But Auntie's hand was never this large, the fingers so smooth. Auntie had been tiny and wrinkled like a plum left to the sun.

_No, it can't be. Auntie Den died years ago_, a little voice reminded her. _Remember? Right before the Chuunin exams._

"Yes. That's right."

_I cried so much that day._

Was it Nurse? No. Nurse's hand was broad and soft, fingers plump with years of good eating. This person's fingers were narrow, their touch hard.

It was a struggle to open her eyes, but she managed, and blinking, she looked up and out. A great sunburst of light whirled before her, the only thing to see besides soft shadows smudged with grey, the color of the sky during rain, and a pale blur that struck off silvery sparks.

"Good," the blur said, voice rich with self-satisfaction. "You're starting to come back to yourself."

oooooo 

When she woke again later, the fever had vanished, but her sight had not yet returned: the world before her eyes was a sea of deep blacks and the grey rain-light, sprinkled here and there with lighter patches, opal billows shimmering against the dark. Hinata strained her eyes until the headache that resulted nearly made her sob from the pain, but nothing became any clearer.

_It's all right_, she told herself as her heart banged against her ribs. _It's all right. I've been ill. I'm not completely blind, because I can still make out light. I shouldn't panic yet, because things might get better. I'll only hurt myself more if I give into fear._

If her eyes were useless, she'd have to make do with other senses. For the first time, Hinata wished that she'd been subject to the more vigorous sensory deprivation training that the rest of the chuunin received, but her father had vetoed it for both herself and Neji, using the argument that Hyuuga eyesight should not be tampered with, not even under the strictly controlled circumstances used for training. She could still clearly remember the week that Kiba and Shino had spent blinded, forced to rely on their other senses to compensate for the lack (Kiba, unsurprisingly, had spent the time bragging that the whole thing was just a walk in the park for him and Akamaru; he was much less cheerful the following week, when hearing had been the next sense to be taken). Hinata had made do with a heavy blindfold, but it wasn't nearly the same.

Counting her breaths to calm herself, she waited until her heart settled down and her body stopped trembling, then started to explore her immediate surroundings. Stroking the bedding with careful fingers, she found that it was heavy, coarse cotton and wool: not fancy, but not worn or thin or dirty either. Her robe was made of similar material and seemed to be clean as well, so she was in a place with some resources and being tended with a degree of care, but there was an musty undernote to the cloth that spoke of something that spent the majority of its time packed away in the dark and dust. The bed she lay on had a painted metal frame speckled with worn spots that snagged on her fingers as she felt her way around; it was also very narrow, as she had only to move her foot a little and it would hit the cool plaster of a wall. _So...maybe some rural villager's cottage? But for some reason, this place feels very large. Like there's much more of it beyond my room. And lots of people are also inside._ For some unaccountable reason, she shivered. _I don't know why I think that when it's so quiet here. Something just feels off...it's almost like the air here is bad..._

Hinata was debating whether to risk getting out of bed or not when there was a soft creaky noise to her left and the unmistakable sound of a lock clicking open, followed by light footsteps. She turned her head automatically towards the noise, and her weak eyes managed to make out something roughly human-shaped and light in color, coming towards her.

"Ah. I didn't think you'd be awake already. That's good, that you're making such a fast recovery," a young, male voice said cheerfully. There was a thump and a clatter like porcelain rocking against metal from somewhere near her shoulder and Hinata's nose was suddenly filled with the smell of rice. "I thought I'd have to force you up to try and get you to swallow some food, but I can see that won't be necessary now. I'm very pleased."

Her mouth was starting to water, but she couldn't risk eating anything until she had more of an idea about where she was. "Um, please, sir," she asked, her voice coming out much smaller and more timid than she would have liked. "Before I eat...a-are you the one who's been taking care of me all this time?"

"Day and night." Wood scraped against wood and his pleasant voice was suddenly coming from a much lower height: he must have dragged something over on which to sit. _Bed, table large enough to hold rice dish, chair or stool. That's what I know is in this room so far._ "Every moment I could get away from my other duties, I've been at your side. You were very sick."

"You're the one who found me in the woods then?"

"I'm surprised you remember that." His tone flattened very slightly. "Yes, that was me. You were nearly out of your mind from the poison. I'm shocked you remember anything about the last few days at all."

"A-am I in a hospital?"

He chuckled softly. "In a way. I am a doctor. You don't have to worry about that."

_What does that mean?_ Her heart was starting to pound again. "My-my eyes--"

"Should make a full recovery in a few days. It was touch and go with the poison for a bit, but I managed to get it all out. The blindness is just a temporary symptom."

Her lips had gone very dry as she'd talked and she licked them with an equally parched tongue, wondering just how long she'd been without food or water. "Please...how much longer until I'm better and can l-leave? M-my family must be so worried and I don't--I don't even know where I am--"

"Why don't you try and eat now?" the man asked suddenly, cutting her off. "I'm sure you must be absolutely starving. Your body needs to regain quite a bit of strength before we can even i think /i about you going anywhere, and the more you eat, the faster your recovery will go." His voice became very gentle, the words soft and low. "Do you think you can sit up?"

The pillow was raised and propped against the headboard while Hinata tried to raise herself up on hands that seemed to be made out of water, for all the support they gave her. When it became obvious that she didn't have enough strength to push herself up, the doctor slipped an arm around her shoulders and lifted her into place, laying her down on the pillow as if she was made of spun glass and would crack if even lightly jostled.

Once she was settled, something warm, flat and heavy was placed in her lap and he took hold of her left hand. "I'm not going to hand-feed you, because I think you can manage, and it would be embarrassing for both of us. You might as well learn, since you'll be like this for a few days," he said, and began to move her hand around to the objects on the tray, naming each in its turn. Rice, yam, egg, fish. Water on the table at her side--he took her arm and extended it until she could feel the smooth coldness of the cup and the little beads of moisture on its side.

With tiny, deliberate movements, she picked up her chopsticks and hesitated for only a moment before she placed them in the dish of rice, and began to eat. If she took only small portions, it really wasn't hard at all.

"Good girl," the doctor said, and even without her sight she could tell he was smiling.

oooooo

Nothing happened.

Hinata spent the next few hours after her meal sleeping on and off, waking to check for new aches or pains, resting her palm against her heart to test her pulse and breathing. She wasn't so sickly that she hadn't missed the way the doctor had avoided answering her questions. Even in Fire Country, it wasn't unknown for shinobi from other lands to slip in and out for their own reasons, though it meant swift, harsh punishment if they were caught. The only outside shinobi that could be trusted even slightly were the Sand-nin, and if her doctor was one, he would have told her his identity and alerted someone from the village to come and pick her up, which obviously wasn't the case.

Therefore, two likely possibilities.

One, her doctor was an extraordinarily cagey civilian who might have an idea who she was, or might not. Civilians living away from Konoha tended to know _of _ninja, but not _about _them, and the Hyuuga bloodline was really only valuable to other ninja. That didn't preclude a knowledgeable outsider from taking in a vulnerable Hyuuga and then selling her to the highest ninja bidder though.

Her eyes would come very dear on such a market.

Sweat was seeping up all over her body, and she pushed the blankets away, curling on her side as the cool air swept down to cover her in place of the blankets. _Don't panic! That's how things get ruined: lives, missions, everything. Just don't panic. You don't know enough to panic yet._

The other possibility was that she was currently in the hands of other ninja. The doctor hadn't seemed at all surprised or curious about how she'd come to be in the woods with wounds all over her body and suffering from poison; he had treated everything very matter-of-factly, which argued towards a medic-nin, and a fairly skilled one at that. He didn't sound that old, but there were a lot of skilled ninja around her age or even younger. He had sidestepped her questions about when she could leave and where she was currently located, which probably meant that he knew she wouldn't like the answers. He could be anyone, from anywhere.

Perhaps even from Sound.

Hinata pulled her knees to her chest, huddling into herself and accidentally bit her lip, a old childhood habit that she'd only managed to outgrow a year ago. The faint salt taste of the blood was almost exactly like tears.

_Now, I told myself not to panic...not to to worry. Little groups of Sound-nin have snuck into before. Didn't they say that they were told ANBU would be coming in our place? We weren't that far from home when we were attacked. For this to be Sound, there would have to be a fairly large group of Sound shinobi in the heart of Fire Country and so close to the village that they shouldn't have escaped notice. _

_How long was I lying out in the woods? I can't be that far from where I was attacked if my condition was so serious. I can remember him saying that I needed immediate treatment. I can't be that far._

_Not that far..._

Her eyes closed as she sketched a map in her head of the Fire Country, the places she'd been with her team and the place where she'd been attacked, the places she might be now, judging, weighing, rejecting. She fell asleep gradually, a skein of endless trees unwinding around a brilliant red dot that shone of home.

The sound of the door opening once more brought her out of sleep and she fumbled half-awake for the blanket, feeling exposed. "Doctor?"

"Dinnertime," he responded, sounding as cheerful and pleasant as before. "Did I wake you? So sorry."

"N-no, it's fine," she answered. "I probably should eat."

His warm hands slid onto her body, lifting her upright once more. "Such a wonderfully strong spirit you have. You'll do so well here. I can tell."

"Here?"

"In the matter of your recovery, of course," he said, and she realized after a minute that the faint, sneezy murmur she was hearing was laughter.

All the sounds and movements from earlier were repeated, and she fumbled with the chopsticks only briefly before getting everything in order again. The rice was easy enough to manage, though she was sure that she dropped a few grains here and there, and the egg could be pressed down into a sort of ball for easy handling. The yam was a problem, being stiff and slippery; she tried carefully breaking it into smaller pieces with her chopsticks, but only succeeded in rattling the dishes and making the doctor laugh at her.

Pushing the yam aside for last, she went to the fish and lifted it to her mouth; it was firm and easy to handle. It wasn't until the first salty-sweet strips met her tongue that she discovered that not only was this not the same fish she had been served earlier, it was one of the only foods she could say that she absolutely, entirely hated. _Crab!_

It took all her willpower to keep chewing and not spit the stuff out: not only was it hideously rude to behave in such a way about a meal someone else had made, she couldn't refuse food that was meant to help her get well. Some twitch of disgust must have shown on her face, however, for the doctor said quietly: "Not to your liking, is it?"

"Oh! Oh no. Please, forgive me," she said, words tumbling out in a frantic rush to appease. "I'm just being silly. It's fine, really." To prove her words, she picked up another piece and moved to eat it. "I don't mean to be a bother."

"No, no, it's me who should be apologizing. I should have known better, but in this village, we really can't be too picky about what food we can scavenge when there are so many mouths to feed. You can hardly grow crops and keep animals when you're constantly on the move, and here, the fish practically catch themselves, so that's what everyone's been eating these last few days. But I really shouldn't have forgotten that you don't like crab." She felt air move against her arm, a quiet scraping sound and the tray suddenly became a little lighter. "So, Miss Hyuuga, if you don't mind my taking it...? I hate to see good food go to waste, and I haven't eaten yet myself."

His words rattled in the air like stones tossed into a pit. _Miss Hyuuga. You don't like crab._ She put the chopsticks down carefully, before her shaking fingers sent them out of her grip entirely. "How could you...W-who are you..?"

"That's right," he answered thoughtfully, "we never were introduced properly, were we? It really does seem that every time we come together, you're unconscious and nearly dying." The feeling of someone's presence moving very close to her. Hot air against the rim of her ear and a whisper: "Do you remember what happened at the Chuunin Exams...?"

She was wordless, breathless, flying fast in some realm called forth by fear beyond speech. Two fingers touched her wrist, crossed together against her pulse as if to count her heartbeats. "Too fast. You should calm down, Miss Hyuuga. It's not good for someone in your condition to be so agitated."

A red and white cat's face paired with a dark cloak, and hands that brought life back to her body. ANBU pulling her away, groggy and newly awakened, for an examination. _That man...do you know what he's done? Traitor. Murderer. Liar._

_Snake in the grass, poison poured down the well._

_Why did he save you?_

Her own small voice:_ I-I really don't know...I didn't know him...I never had anything to do with him._

Hinata made herself turn her head to face him, though every muscle she had was stiff with agonized fright, and managed to draw enough of a breath to ask: "...Why?"

The fingers around her wrist squeezed lightly. "Because I could. Because you're you. Now, Miss Hyuuga. Show me again what a smart young lady you are, and tell me my name and where you are."

A whimper slid free before she could suppress it: the words he wanted her to say were threatening to choke her, gobbling up all her air. "The village...hidden...in the...Sound, and you...are...K-Kabuto--"

"Kabuto Yakushi," he finished for her. "Yes. Welcome to my humble home, Lady Hinata. I do hope you'll enjoy your stay."

_What can you say to something like that?_ she thought wildly, and against her better judgment, fainted.

oooooo 

The first thing that Hinata did once she regained consciousness was get out of bed.

Shivering and holding the edge of the mattress for support, she let go and took a few tottery steps forward, nearly pitching to the ground once or twice. She moved in a crouch when her legs became too weak to support her, then dragged herself up and continued when she felt stronger, sweating through her robes. The room was roughly twenty paces by twenty paces; she located a door that turned out to be a small water closet (toilet and sink) and the door that shut her off from the outside, which was fastened with a number of heavy iron locks.

Finished, she stumbled back to her bed and slept fitfully, waking with a frantic jump every so often. Food arrived, always while she was asleep, but she didn't touch it. Kabuto never came while she was awake, or if he did, she didn't know it. Another day passed before she composed herself enough to recognize that her behavior was not helping matters and if Kabuto was watching, likely causing him a great deal of amusement. She was better than this, and needed to calm herself down, find out as much information as possible, and try to plan an escape route.

_For all my brave thoughts about not panicking, when push came to shove, I fell apart, _she thought, with more than a touch of rue. _Time to make it up to myself and try again._

_And don't think about him, _she counseled as she made herself eat some rice, the only food she felt might be somewhat safe, as it was so bland that poisoning it would be very difficult. The only person supposedly capable of making odorless, tasteless poisons was Lady Tsunade, and Hinata was nearly certain that Kabuto planned to keep her breathing for at least a little while: besides, if she starved herself, she wouldn't be in any condition to escape even if she did find a chance. _Just don't think about him. Pull yourself away. _

_Take another look around. Maybe there's something I missed the other day._

The one good thing so far was that her eyes were slowly, but definitely improving. Hinata now saw the world in shades of grey and bright shards of light, though edges were blurred and shaky, objects not always where they appeared. As time passed, the light inside her room grew stronger, and Hinata found herself drawn to one particularly vivid area not far from her bed; it looked to be shaped like a rectangle and about as wide as her outstretched arms.

Padding over to it, her feet rough against the cool stone floor, she reached out and touched the glowing rectangle, feeling cold smoothness under her hands, a material that squeaked almost inaudibly under her fingers when she dragged them on down. Going back, she discovered oily smudges where her hands had been; it was undoubtedly a window. Pushing against it did nothing; it was very likely locked and bolted, if not barred. Kabuto wasn't stupid. Her elbows banged into something set lower on the wall, by the feel of it a wooden shelf.

A minute's searching found her the stool again, and she pulled it towards the window, one hand outstretched so she could feel where the little shelf began. The stool made her just tall enough so she could prop her arms up on the shelf and rest her chin in the basket of her hands, tears streaming freely down her face as she stared against the light. She blinked often, every now and then freeing a hand so she could wipe away some of the tears. The first step to anything was getting her eyesight back, and she had to make it stronger, no matter what. Her eyes must be forced to deal with the light again, even if it burned with the same pain as catching a drifting spark in the eye.

Gradually, the light grew softer and her eyes stopped watering so badly, but she sat and continued to watch, wondering if the long dark streaks across the light might be trees.

Kabuto slipped up on her so quietly that she didn't notice him until he placed a hand on her shoulder; she shot forward and bumped her chin badly on the wooden shelf. He laughed his not-quite laugh.

"Daydreaming? You must be starting to relax; I've been standing here for fifteen minutes, just watching you. You never noticed a thing." He moved his hand off her shoulder, putting it before her face, his fingers stretched wide and wiggled them back and forth slowly; Hinata could see the movement and roughly make out the separate lines of his fingers. "What are they teaching you back in Konoha?"

"I-I'm sure you already know," she replied, her voice quavery and very low, skipping like a worn-out record. _It's like being twelve years old all over again_. "Y-you were a Leaf-nin. Once."

"Was I?" he said, equally low, then pitched his voice back to its normal volume. "I have a present for you. Close your eyes."

"W-what?"

"Close or be closed," he hummed, and suddenly put both hands down flat over her eyes, the inside fingers pinching her nose; Hinata tried to pull away, but his arms had her trapped. "Oh, and relax. This might hurt a little bit."

That really set her to struggling but he simply moved in closer, so that her head was pushed back against his chest and tucked his arms in, imprisoning her shoulders; she beat her knees furiously against the underside of the shelf and succeeded only in bruising them severely. "My goodness, whatever happened to gratitude? Count of three: three, two, one..."

Iridescence burst behind her eyes, shattering into fragments that glittered silver and gold, a diamond in sunlight. It felt as though something was torn free inside her head and all the glittering faded and turned darker, shrinking away into nothing. She slumped down against his chest as all the lights went and realized she was crying freely.

"Open your eyes."

Her eyes were gritty and sodden with tears, and her first tentative blinking showed her the same fuzzy world she had grown used to. Then she blinked again, and saw the scabby white frame of her bed, the deep blue of its blankets. She was wearing a pure white robe and the arm across her shoulders was wearing a blue-grey shirt and covered with fine, silvery hairs. There were three small moles on his lower arm.

She lifted her chin to see him smiling down at her, glasses shielding his eyes with light.

"How would you like," he asked, "to have a bath?"

oooooo

Kabuto led her away after dinner, a small basket over his arm with a change of clothing, a towel and some soap. He'd also produced a pair of old-fashioned reed sandals from somewhere and bade her put on them on: "The floors can be quite chilly at night."

Roots wound themselves into snarls and knots overhead as they walked through the little puddles of light cast by torches placed high on the packed-dirt walls; it looked as if Otogakure had been carved out of a forest hillside, Orochimaru only bothering to bring in what was absolutely necessary to his lair and letting the rest run wild. Here and there, they passed a door set deep into the wall: every one was barred and studded with iron and closed fast with heavy locks. The soft _slap-slap-slap_ of her sandals was the only noise to be heard: Kabuto's footsteps were utterly soundless. No other people were present, or if they were, they kept their silence.

Hinata was so busy trying to memorize every little detail of her surroundings--_but everything looks the same, and I'm sure that was deliberate_-- that when Kabuto abruptly stopped walking, she continued forward and ended up bumping into his back, hurting her nose against the sharp wing of his shoulder blade. He shot her an amused look over that shoulder, his eyes knowing and smug, and pulled out a large ring of keys, rapidly sorting through them. It took him only a few seconds to find the right one, though there looked to be hundreds.

"There's already water inside," he said, wiggling the key in the weighty iron lock. "The rest is here. I think ten minutes should be enough for you to clean yourself, don't you?"

About to answer, she thought better of it, not trusting her voice, and settled for a stiff, brief nod. Handing off the basket to her, he put his shoulder to the door and shoved it open, then bowed her inside with a smile and an adjustment of his glasses.

The room was small and round, with concrete walls and far better lighting than the hallway outside; taking up much of the floor space was the pool, filled with clean-looking water and set into the ground in the center. Heavy with moisture, the air was so warm that Hinata felt herself beginning to sweat, and her hand moved to the tie of her robe, then dropped back to her side. Kabuto was posed on the door jamb, one hand still holding the lock. She looked at him, and got yet another smile.

"I'll be just outside if you need anything. Ten minutes," he said again and backed away, pulling the door shut behind him.

Once he was gone, she walked over to the door and peered all around it, but the walls seemed solid enough and there were no spyholes that she could find. Not that it really mattered, for he must have seen her naked when he was tending her--someone had undressed her, after all--but it was the principle of the thing that mattered. Hesitantly certain that she was really and truly alone, she unknotted her sash, and laid it aside, but left the robe hanging loose off her shoulders, not willing to leave herself completely exposed. The fresh robe she put on a bench that ran along one side of the wall, next to a old bucket with a fraying rope handle.

The soap from the basket was black and smelled strongly of pine; it was very much like the kind some of Konoha's oldest residents still kept in their homes, made from some kind of tree resin. Hinata walked over to the pool and dipped a hand in, testing; the water was as warm as a hot spring and up close, carried a trace of mineral scent. Her feet went in next and she wriggled her toes, feeling her muscles ease up and relax.

That was when she noticed the chains built in to the sides of the bath.

She drew her feet out immediately, backed off a few steps, and stared. Long ropes of metal hung from thick plates that had been set into the concrete that lined the pool, each as wide as her arm and probably weighing more than three of her did combined. Chains in a bath. Several notions about what exactly those chains could be used for began to creep into her mind, all involving boiling water and a sadistic ugliness that made tears blur her eyes.

Her next few minutes were spent in a huddle on the floor away from the pool, her head cradled in the warm angles of her arms as she cried silently for a while; then she stopped, wiped away her tears as best she could and got up. The ten minutes she had been granted had to be nearly up, and Kabuto would certainly ask why she hadn't washed if he came in and saw her still in her old robe, her hair a thick, snarled mess down her back.

Taking the bucket from the bench, she crept back to the pool and dipped up some of the water in that, then squatted next to the edge and hastily washed herself, scrubbing down every inch of her body with the harsh soap until she was certain all the dirt had been washed away. By the time Kabuto opened the door again, she'd dried off, put the new robe on and was attempting to comb through her hair with her fingers, pulling out strands all the while.

He looked her over and smiled, eyes gleaming complacency.

"Doesn't it feel better to be clean?"

oooooo 

He never said anything about the damp, moved bucket, or the water spilled next to the pool. He'd simply collected her dirty clothing, walked her back to her room, said good night and locked her in.

She lay awake for a long time that night as her damp hair dried against her neck and she strained to hear any noise, no matter how small or soft, that would give her a better idea of what was waiting for her out in Otogakure's halls. After hours passed with no sound aside from her own quiet breathing, she put that task aside and instead tried to piece together what little she knew about Kabuto, determined not to go into their next meeting unarmed. He wasn't the only one who could make use of hoarded information.

Kabuto Yakushi. War orphan, foundling from who-knows-where, left alone and alive on a bloody battlefield at the age of three and three-quarters. The Chief Medical Officer at the time had found the boy among the corpses, taken pity on him, and brought him up as his own son, perhaps thinking that he would fill the void left by the untimely death of his pregnant young wife some years before. (This--according to Ibiki Morino, in charge of briefing the chuunin at the time--was just more proof that good ninja avoided emotional entanglements. "If Mikage had gotten the hell over his wife and kid when he should have, _years ago_, would I be standing here talking to you pigs and wasting good air on the little bastard today? No. I'd be doing something much more interesting with my life, like torturing that Hidden Mist asshole we've got locked up in cell 3.")

He had been a shy, sweet-natured child, not outstanding in any way, save for a mildly expressed interest in his father's medical practice. It had taken him three tries to pass the Academy's exit exam, and his career as a Leaf genin had been entirely unremarkable: everyone who had been interrogated after the fact agreed on this. There had been no warning signs of hidden talents, no indication that the stammering boy in their midst was secretly jounin-level and capable of killing ANBU with ridiculous ease. Seven times a dropout at the Chuunin exam. Five years with Orochimaru (that was ANBU's best guess, based on available evidence). Only he knew for certain exactly how long he had been a traitor.

Hinata shut her eyes.

There was a grey-haired boy lurking around the edges of the memory of her mother's funeral procession, standing with his father and the rest of the hospital staff as they bowed their forgiveness to her father for not being able to save her mother's life. He must have been around twelve or thirteen then, an adult to her six year-old eyes. During the round of condolences she had stared at the ground the whole time, too shy and well-bred and frightened to look any of the adults in the eyes. A cluster of voices surrounded her, well-meaning hands patting her hair. "Poor little thing."

"Such a pity."

"She's cute. How horrible, losing her mother like that."

Was he the one who had slipped her a piece of candy? 

Another memory rolled up: herself at eight. Sitting nervous and tearful on the crinkled-paper edge of an examining table with a painfully throbbing ankle and a stomach that felt as if it was filled with humming bees. She had fallen badly during school--_small hands pushing at her, stumbling, flailing wildly in the air, then the pain_--and the teachers had sent off to the hospital to be treated, fearing a broken bone and Hyuuga wrath. The doctor who examined her was tall and thin, all gawky angles and a fluffy mass of grey hair; his hands were cold and bony, though gentle and deft. He told jokes to try and cheer her up, offered her a sweet to suck, which she took less from actual want and more from politeness and fear. Only later would she find out he was Chief Medical Officer Yakushi, sent to her because of her status as a Hyuuga and the anticipation that her family would find some minuscule flaw in the work of a lesser doctor. Midway through the procedure, the door opened and a young man came in, moving slowly, his hands filled with rolls of bandages.

"You're late," the doctor said with a frown that drew his bushy eyebrows together into one fierce arcing line. "What took you so long?"

The boy glanced at at her first, his eyes oddly flat behind his shiny, round glasses, then turned towards the doctor, his gaze lowered. "I'm sorry, father," he said, voice dull and even and not sorry at all. "It won't happen again."

"Kabuto, you--" Hinata cringed against the noise, hating raised voices: the doctor snapped off his sentence after a look at her. "Never mind. I'll speak to you later. Yuzu is waiting for you down in Exam 7. Mind yourself and don't forget to thank her after you're done."

"I don't know what's wrong with him these days," his father said as the boy slipped out without another word. He shook his head so his hair flew around wildly, like dust sent up by a vigorous broom. "He was always so polite, so cheerful, and now..." Trailing off, he reached for the roll of bandages that Kabuto had left on the table beside her and stooped so he could bind her ankle. "I suppose it's just teenage nonsense, but he's always been such a good boy, if a little shy. I was hoping to avoid it."

Later, her ankle finished, she sat in the waiting room, where someone from the family would come to pick her up. A quiet noise behind her made her turn, and she saw the boy from before, watching her from the deep shadow cast by the doorway.

"Oh," he said awkwardly when he saw her looking, apparently just catching on that he'd been spotted. "Father sent me to see if you needed anything else."

"No, thank you," she whispered. Her fingers twirled together in her lap as she fought the urge to run away and find a safe dark spot in which to hide. There was something really funny with his eyes, she decided; they looked like glass, like a doll's, with no life behind.

"You're a Hyuuga, right?" he asked through a sudden cough, startling her. "We hardly see any of your family. Here, or anywhere else."

She made an indistinct noise down in her throat and hoped fervently that he would take it as an answer and go away. Instead, he came around to her and knelt, his body just out of arms' reach, looking up into her eyes. Behind the glasses, his own were the deep grey of a storm cloud, darkening to black towards the pupil.

"You're a little shy, aren't you?" he said kindly, and for the first time there was warmth and something like life in his gaze. "Don't be. You have such pretty eyes." 

Her tenth year. The Chief Medical Officer's funeral procession. A swift-spreading cancer had left him with only a year to live; he had died within a month. Kabuto lead the crowd behind the coffin as chief mourner, clutching his father's black-rimmed memorial picture in his arms, his face pulled thin in the rainy grey light. His father's plot was not far from her mother's and she caught a last look at him standing graveside, his back hunched up like a sickly old man's, as the Hyuuga left the cemetery for home. 

A torrent of noise at the stadium drowned out by the pain in her chest, and Kiba-kun calling out to her. A voice, the red and white swirls on a mask. Arms bearing her up. A warmth creeping slowly through the icy cold of her heart, blood flowing back through her body, veins unfrozen, lungs heating. She drew one breath, held it, drew another.

Words came to her, soft rushes of sound: _No more for her, or for you either_, and that was the last thing she heard. 

Hinata lay quietly in the darkness.

Kabuto could pluck anything out of her and use it for his own liking: words, gestures, how quickly her heart beat, the number of breaths she took per minute. He likely meant to pull her apart, crack open the vault of the Hyuuga bloodline and take that knowledge for himself, for his master and his own ends. Very little could be hidden here, and she was in the hands of someone who could literally manipulate every molecule of the air around her.

She could die, but even that wouldn't save the Byakugan; there was no cursed seal emblazoned on her forehead to keep her silent after death. She could give herself up as a lost cause. Neither was acceptable, even if the only alternative sent her sick and dizzy at her own daring.

_What are my options?_ she thought, watching the blackness behind her eyelids. _I die. I fold. I fight._

_Fight someone who now has all the power in the world over me. But Naruto-kun fought him and in a way, won._

_Naruto-kun would want me to fight._

_Neji-niisan would fight. Hanabi-chan would fight._

She folded her hands over her heart and felt strangely calm, almost giddy. i Perhaps this is my ultimate test of strength. If I can make it out of this, I can make it through anything. /i

_It's decided, then._

_I will not let him change me._

_I will go home to my family._

_I will survive this._

Only later would she recognize that the hollow hope and determination underlying her words had not been enough to entirely save herself from him.


	6. Aconite, Root and Stem

AN: Hooh boy.

Originally, this was supposed to have three parts: Neji and Hanabi, Tsunade, and finally Hinata and Hinata's dream sequence. I started to work on this, mostly finished up Tsunade's section, realized I had about 5000 words and still hadn't written anything for Neji's section and I still hadn't gotten anywhere near the meat of Hinata's section, which involves a huge and convoluted dream sequence that's probably going to end up as 3000 words just on its own.

So because I haven't updated in so long, and because I hate making people wait for fic updates (because I know how it feels, honestly) I'm splitting this chapter into two sections: Aconite (Root and Stem) which is finished and being posted now, and Aconite (Bloom and Branch) which will have Neji and Hinata and her dream. Hopefully I can get the second section done relatively soon (because it has Kabuto! and weirdness! and lots of other good stuff) but I also have a major school assignment due at the end of this week, so we'll see.

**Muma V: Aconite (Root and Stem)**

_New love, new love, where are you to lead me?_

_All along a narrow way that marks a crooked line._

_How are you to slake me, and how are you to feed me?_

_With bitter yellow berries, and a sharp new wine. _

-Dorothy Parker

Thanks to Naruto, they were almost late. The clock had just started striking two when they arrived at the ANBU building Morino had chosen for their appointment; Shizune handed over their passes at the desk, and the young ANBU working there checked them over, cataloged their weapons--one pair of scissors, medium sharp, a set of arm darts, and a few kunai Tsunade had forgotten about and was surprised to discover in the depths of her jacket pockets--made them sign in, then stamped their passes with a nod for the Hokage and let them through. "The Lady Hyuuga is in room 3," he said, and pointed out the way.

The faintly oily scent of polish was strong in Tsunade's nose as they walked through the quiet halls and she resisted the urge to scuff her feet against the wooden floors. Here was the side of ANBU that very few outsiders would ever see; the "visitation" rooms for people like Hinata, who were in ANBU custody for one reason or another, but were not actually criminals. There were real windows up here, doors without fifteen pounds of iron restraints and bolts, sunlight instead of the guttering oil lamps and low-watt bulbs that the dungeon made use of. It was something of a farce, but over the deep darkness of the dungeons, a definite improvement.

A day or so back, the Hokage had calmly suggested to Ibiki Morino that since Hinata was not a criminal, there was no harm in allowing her upstairs for a visit where she could get a little fresh air and sunshine, as an aid to her mental state; he had agreed and added that if they got the girl a haircut so she wasn't constantly hiding herself behind the long strands or flicking them out of her face, he'd let Hinata out for a few more hours than normal.

"No family members, no other people except for you and Ms. Shizune," he'd rumbled in his cut-rock voice. "If everything continues well, she'll be out in a few days anyway. She can see everyone she wants then."

Hinata was sitting on a chair in the patch of sunlight cast by the only window in the room, arms resting on the sill and gaze fixed out the window, though it was doubtful how much of the outside she could actually see: ANBU had special jutsu for upstairs rooms such as this one that permitted sunlight and air in, but blocked any view of the actual landscape, as well as keeping anyone outside from looking in.

An open book lay on the windowsill by her folded arms, wind shuffling the pages with a faint rasping sound, and Tsunade was a little surprised to see that it was a child's book of fairytales, with pictures like small, brilliant jewels. Hinata glanced up and smiled faintly, greeted them in her soft voice. She looked tired and actually thinner than when she'd arrived back in Konoha; according to the ANBU reports, she hadn't been eating that well and spent much of her time sleeping when not being interrogated. The ends of her hair were very ragged, as if she'd been pulling on them.

"I wish that Tonton could've come in with us, but they refused to allow it," Shizune said, a little wistfully as she got the scissors out and Tsunade handed over her comb. "She might not look it, but she's actually really good at comforting, for a pig."

Hinata nodded a little at this, carefully holding her head steady while Shizune brushed, but her eyes kept returning to the window and the book.

"Did your sister send that over?" Tsunade asked, gesturing towards the little book as she pulled up the only other chair in the room. She knew that Neji and Hanabi had been allowed to send over a few small personal items--all rigorously checked by ANBU, of course--to try and give Hinata a little comfort while she was here, and she seriously doubted that ANBU kept books of fairytales on hand for their prisoners.

"Yes. I used to read this to her all the time when she was younger," Hinata replied, and her face eased a little, then tensed up again. "Though...she doesn't have to...she shouldn't worry about me too much. I'm all right. She's hurt much more badly than I ever was. I'll be home in a few more days. She has months of recovery ahead of her, doesn't she?"

Typical of Hinata to put others ahead of herself, Tsunade thought as she cast around for a suitable answer; while Hanabi had been very badly injured in the Akatsuki attack that had also taken Hiashi Hyuuga's life, Hinata had been a prisoner in bloody Sound for over half a year and would likely be feeling the mental repercussions for the next few years, if not the rest of her life, her scant physical damage be damned. Hiashi and Hanabi had fallen in battle: while it was a tragedy, it was also the shinobi way--you came, you fought, you fell and it wasn't exactly a rare thing either.

Tsunade still had a vivid recollection of standing on a dais, draped in the stifling cloth of the Hokage's formal robes and watching in silence with the other officials that made up Konoha's Council as Hiashi Hyuuga's funeral procession marched by, a wall of black and white in the middle of Konoha's bursting summer hues. The last time she'd seen the stark grandeur of the Hyuuga in procession had been over twenty years ago, when Hiraki Hyuuga had finally given up the ghost, after years of hanging on in silent ferocity while his chronic illness ate him away, bit by bit.

Against Setsuna Hyuuga's vigorous protests, Hanabi had bowed to her Great-aunt Eiko's demands and assumed her place as acting Head of the family for the funeral: her injuries has necessitated that she be carried on a litter, Neji at her side in defiance of all Hyuuga tradition. The girl could barely hold her head up from what Tsunade assumed was a heavy combination of grief as well as the massive amounts of medications she was on for her treatment and she had felt thick rage bubble up inside her; Head of the family or not, Hanabi had been in no condition to be out in public.

"Your sister's doing okay," she said finally. "She's got a lot of physical therapy ahead of her, among other things. But--depending on how well she responds to the treatment--she'll probably be able to eventually resume her training as a ninja." She decided not to mention that Hanabi would never have perfect use of that leg again, or that it had taken an entire team of med-nin nearly a day to get her crushed leg into a state where it was even repairable.

"But she'll be far behind everyone else," Hinata said sadly, "and she liked being at the Academy, even if Father didn't want her there. I thought that she was starting to make friends."

"She's keeping up with her schoolwork at home. Iruka won't let her fall behind," Tsunade said reassuringly, hoping to bring a little spark back into Hinata's face, give her something positive to hold on to. "He's very fond of her and I'm pretty sure she likes him too."

In fact, once the formal procession was over and everyone was left at the cemetery to mill around aimlessly until they'd shouldered enough of their grief to go on home, Iruka, backed by Hanabi's classmates, had stunned the Hyuuga contingent by daring to give the grief-stricken girl a fierce hug; Hanabi had then heaped insult upon injury by crying into his shoulder for a good ten minutes straight, until Hiyashi Hyuuga's death glare and Eiko Hyuuga's strangled squawking had pulled them apart. Undaunted, Iruka had told Neji and Hanabi to call on him if they ever needed anything, gathered his brood back around him and marched serenely off.

Once he had gone, Hanabi had rubbed the tears off her face (smearing her ceremonial makeup in the process) smiled for the first time since the attack, took one last look at her father's monument, and led everyone else back home.

"I'm glad," Hinata said; a smile touched the corner of her mouth, hovered there for a moment, then left. "I was so worried about her when I heard what happened. They only told me at first that Father had died. I didn't believe them, of course." Her gaze shifted to the window, the dark wings of her eyebrows coming together in a line. "Then Sasuke-kun came and told me it was true, and that Hanabi had been badly hurt, and that Father had died protecting her. Since he had no reason to lie, I believed him," she said, her voice as delicate and brittle as a bird's bone.

"And what," Tsunade asked carefully, "did Yakushi do when you found out?" Hinata's gaze immediately lowered at the question and her fingers played against each other once again.

"He tried," she finally murmured, "to comfort me."

The Hokage's eyebrows shot high and she couldn't stop herself from making a small noise of surprise. _Well,_ she thought, _that was an unexpected response._ "And you...?"

"Pushed him away. By accident, really. I just wanted to be alone, so he left."_ The ANBU on the other side of the wall must be having a field day with this, though it's not like it wouldn't have come up eventually._ "So in addition to crying, I was also afraid that he'd do something, as a punishment for shoving him, especially when he showed up later with tea."

"You suspected poison? So what did you do?"

Hinata shrugged, helplessly. "He was insistent, so I sipped it and didn't notice anything. I was pretty good at telling poison by then, since he'd spent that month or so poisoning me, and he's good, but not as good as you, Lady Tsunade; he can't make anything completely tasteless. I drank it. Nothing happened and he never told me otherwise."

"Wait a minute," Shizune said sharply, scissors stilled on the piece of hair she was about to cut, "did you just say that _Kabuto poisoned you for a month?_"

The sharp tone had little effect on Hinata, who merely looked tired and sad."Yes. Though he asked for my permission first. It wasn't so bad." Her eyelids fell lower and lower as she talked until they lay entirely shut.

Tsunade had already heard all this at one of the earlier interrogation sessions and put it behind her, so Hinata's statement drew forth nothing more than a frown, but Shizune had no such defense to muster and her hands jerked in shock at the younger girl's dispassionate words; if Tsunade hadn't shot forward and grabbed her wrist to steady her, Hinata would ended up missing a stupendous chunk out of her back hair. "_Asked you for permission?_ What, what kind of nerve does that damned little brat have? Like you had a choice in the matter! _Permission my ass!_ Why, he--"

"Shizune, if you keep going off like that at every twisted little thing Yakushi's done, you're going to stress yourself into a heart attack," Tsunade interrupted dryly, her eyes locked onto the younger woman's furious face. "Besides, this is Yakushi we're talking about here; I wouldn't be surprised if he did it just for the satisfaction of messing with people's minds if Hinata ever got out and told anyone. Now, calm down and stop waving the scissors around before you put out Hinata's eye; I'm not spending time that could be devoted to good, hard drinking repairing injuries that result from your overly-excited nerves. Sheesh." Shizune was a wonderful assistant in most ways: letting her drink in peace and quiet (most of the time) nagging just enough but not too much, and she was a competent overseer and a talented medic, but she did have a lamentable tendency to go flying off the handle at very little provocation.

(Like the way she always reacted to the Hokage's numerous, ill-fated gambling attempts; after they'd had to skip town for the fiftieth time in row, Shizune should have realized that continually yelling "Oh god, oh god, they're gaining on us, Lady Tsunade, how could you!" etc, etc, was a waste of time and breath and did more harm than good, but for some reason the younger woman just never caught on.)

For her own part, Hinata looked horribly embarrassed at being the cause of such a fuss, her hands lifted in a gesture half-defensive, half-supplicating. "Um, I don't know if he was doing it just to be contrary--with him that's always a possibility--but he was always very polite and formal with me, and I think his asking might have also been from that. And, um, you really don't have to get that upset about it. He never gave me anything that had a truly negative effect on my body; the worst they ever did was make me feel cold and sleepy, and after he got the data he wanted, he stopped. It was also a little game, of sorts; if I could tell he'd poisoned something, I didn't have to take it."

"You were helping with the examination, Shizune," Tsunade reminded, crossing one leg over the other in an attempt to get more comfortable. Damn hard chairs. "No major damage, no sign of healed major damage, no poison tracks, no nothing."

Shizune's mouth thinned as she clipped at Hinata's hair with a vengeance, no doubt wishing it was Yakushi's neck between the blades instead of innocent strands of hair. "Still," she said, her voice harsh, "he did enough and I can't believe he didn't do more."

There was a little silence in response, and then Hinata stirred and spoke again. "Part of that..." she murmured, her voice very soft but clear, like the sound of distant rain, "is because he didn't want to ruin me. No matter how cleanly you can repair damage, if you damage something, it will never be the same again. Even the lightest cut can leave a lasting mark. He said that I was the closest and best thing next to having an unsealed Hyuuga child to study, and he wanted to keep me as close to this "base state" as possible. It was important for his research." Her fingers dug at her hand again, but her next words were dry and perfectly even, "He's a little obsessed with bloodline limits," and the Hokage thought again of how tired Hinata must be of acting as the medium for Yakushi's message, opening her own mouth only to hear his words coming flying out.

She tapped her foot against the floor and wondered suddenly just how much of what Yakushi said was his own or if he was also silently mouthing the words of whatever personality he had appropriated for the situation.

"Your hair got so long," Shizune told Hinata quietly after another short period of silence had passed, clearly trying to move onto less inflammatory topics. "I'm a little surprised that it grew so much in just six months."

"It shouldn't have," Hinata answered as if this was a failing, one hand coming up to pull gently at a hank that lay over her breast. "It was cut before. Um, I mean that Mr. Kabuto cut it before. We both did, actually."

Tsunade's mouth dropped open as her mind worked around Hinata's last sentence. "What? What do you mean, you _both _cut it? And since when did Yakushi give a damn about your hair?"

"I did the sides: he cut the back, where I couldn't see. Ah, why...? My hair was a potential hazard when carrying out my duties in the labs. That's what he said, anyway... he gets very...agitated? No, not agitated. Annoyed. Resentful, if things aren't kept in order. He can't stand to have his things out of place, even little things." She looked down at her hands, and slowly moved her fingers in towards her palm, then out again, as if she was trying to coax feeling back into them after a long spell of cold.

"A place for everything and everything in its place, right?" Shizune said tightly, but her hands remained steady and her only other movement was to pinch her brows together in a frown. Tsunade silently applauded this show of effort.

At Shizune's words, Hinata's lips parted slightly and a strange light flickered in her eyes.

"...Yes. A place for everything...everything in its place," Hinata answered after a beat, her expression tight-lipped and considering. "I should have seen it before."

"Hinata?" Tsunade asked gently once a few minutes had passed; Hinata had remained silent throughout and Tsunade felt oddly troubled by the girl's reaction. It's just a common phrase, why on earth did that look come into her eyes...? Like bad news she was suspecting and was just told has come. Or...or like she's seen a complete stranger wearing a loved one's face. Thoughts and reality collide...

The Hyuuga blinked, and shook herself, pressed a thumb to her eyelid as if to wipe all traces of her former expression away, leaving nothing but blank ivory behind. "Oh, no, it's nothing. Honestly nothing. It just...made me realize something. That's all."

"Something I should know about?" she asked with a raised brow, struggling to keep her disquiet from showing on her face, but Hinata shook her head, once: no. She fiddled with her hands, the hem of her shirt, the free strands of her hair; Shizune continued to cut, face set in a glower, and finally Tsunade asked: "So, why did he have to help? Cut your hair, I mean."

Was that relief skittering over Hinata's face, or just a shadow from a passing cloud? "Oh. It probably won't surprise you to learn this, but there are no mirrors in Otogakure."

Filled to the brim with suspicions as to why Orochimaru might dislike mirrors, Tsunade said nothing, and so it fell to Shizune to finally say: "Really? No mirrors, huh...Do you know why?"

Hinata raised a shoulder in a kind of half-shrug. "Not really. Maybe the Sound nin have small mirrors for their own use; I never saw any. I wasn't allowed to associate with them at all, except for the two that escorted me when I was outside the medical wing, and even then, they weren't allowed to speak to me much beyond 'yes, miss' and 'no, miss'." A few stray hairs floated down on her bare arms and she lifted a hand to brush them away, scratching absently as if they tickled. "There were very tiny mirrors for medical use only. Nothing full-sized. Nothing where you could see even a small part of your face. So I needed him to help."

"I still can't believe he gave you scissors," Shizune murmured. "Is he so overconfident that he'll blithely hand off a potential weapon to an enemy?" Her voice shook a little with indignation as she snipped off more hair. "Or did he think so little of you that he just didn't care...?"

"Nothing like that: it just wouldn't have done anything. The scissors, I mean," Hinata said, and there was a tiny tremor in her voice that made Tsunade sit up and take notice. "He took me aside not long after I'd come, and showed me pretty graphically why he could allow me to handle scissors." Her eyes turned to the Hokage, but it was obvious that Hinata's mind was somewhere much farther off. Her hands came up, sliding slowly over her cheeks as if to make sure that the skin was still there, then moved in towards her mouth."He, ah, offered to let me stab him through the heart and said that if you were capable of withstanding it, he was as well. When I r-refused, he stabbed himself through the h-hand instead, and...and pulled..."

"Oh god, oh god," Tsunade muttered as her stomach did a slow roil and Hinata made a sound like a cut-off sob. "Regeneration or not, that little fucking bastard."

"I don't know why," Hinata said from behind her hands. Her narrow shoulders shook. "I never thought about these t-things after they happened, and they didn't really bother me while I was there, but now that I'm not, I just think about them and I feel horrible all over again..."

Tsunade leaned forward and curled her hands around Hinata's arms, rubbing gently, while a dull ache spread all over her own body, pulling worst at her belly and bones, and she wondered how much more there was to endure. "It's because you're no longer part of a situation where self-mutilation is hardly the worst thing you can experience," she said tiredly, "and because you've been doing nothing for the past few days but reliving every sordid, ugly little detail, pulling them out to the forefront when before they were just background noise. Everything's churned up in your mind now, and it's going to be a while before it settles again. It's okay to be upset. It's all right to cry. Just don't repress it--the memory or your reactions--and it will soon dissolve away into darkness, where it belongs."

Slowly, Hinata's hands lowered, revealing a few stray tears and damp white eyes that weren't even slightly bloodshot: Tsunade sometimes thought that milk ran in the veins of the Hyuuga in place of blood; it would certainly explain a lot, she decided. That Hinata was crying at all was quiet testament to the immense emotional strain she was under; she hadn't even shed one tear when her own cousin had nearly beaten her to death, Tsunade had heard. Just smiled and bled and nearly died.

"Please," Hinata asked suddenly, her voice thick and hoarse as one of her pale hands rubbed away hard at the tears."Tell me how everyone else is."

Tsunade looked across to Shizune and shrugged a little. "Kiba's been almost as bad as Naruto, coming here and trying to demand his way in. I had to get both his mother and his sister to threaten him with severe bodily damage before he called it quits with the frontal assault, but every second that he and Akamaru don't have something else to do, they're out in front, waiting. Shino...well, who can ever really tell with the Aburame? I'm sure he wants to see you just as badly, but unlike Kiba, he's actually got half a brain and some self control. He and Kurenai send wishes for your recovery and said they'll see you once you're released."

She tapped a finger against her chin, thinking, while Shizune made gentle adjustments to the position of Hinata's head. "Who else? Well-wishes from the usual suspects--Guy, Lee, Tenten, Asuma and his crew. Kakashi." Her face suddenly turned grim. "Don't be surprised if the latter corners you about Sasuke after you're released, even though I told him to leave you the hell alone and that I'd divulge any pertinent information that came out regarding Uchiha to him myself." She curled and uncurled a fist, feigning threats. "If he harasses you, let me know and I'll beat the crap out of him personally."

"I-I don't think that he'd be like that," Hinata said, voice rising on an edge of alarm. "Kakashi-sensei is basically kind, after all, and he risked himself to help the others save me..."

The Hokage snorted, breaking Hinata's chain of words. "Risked it mostly for Sasuke, you mean. Don't get me wrong, he'd save you in a heartbeat if it came to that. But you can't deny that his--and Naruto's, of course--primary interest in this mission was the possibility of recovering Sasuke." Her lips tightened on her next words. "And from what you've told us so far, I'm beginning to seriously doubt that anything about that brat is recoverable, but try and even hint at that to Naruto, and you might as well be whispering in a windstorm, for all the good it will do."

Hinata looked away, and for once, her hands went still. "Sasuke-kun is very dear to Naruto-kun," she began as Shizune clicked the scissors shut and released Hinata's head, the haircut completed. Her hair now hung a little past her shoulders, crow-black and gleaming, the cut ends rising gently in the air from the window. "Naruto-kun will never give up on him, not until he's dead. He'll follow Sasuke-kun to the ends of the earth and even farther beyond." She took a breath and went on. "Naruto-kun would do all that for him."

"And when I reminded Sasuke-kun of that," she said, so quietly that Tsunade had to strain to hear her, "he almost killed me." She looked back up at Tsunade, her eyes brilliant with grief.

"What will Naruto-kun think of that?"

The Hokage managed to contain herself until they were a safe distance away; almost out of the building in fact, even though the door had been shut fast upon Hinata after they had left, and then exploded into a shower of curses.

"Goddamnit, what the hell is that brat playing at? What the hell was his whole purpose in this? Teaching her things, showing her his techniques, his secrets, if I can even use that word with a straight face about him. Sugar, poison, politeness and lies. Wheels within wheels and riddles within riddles." She kicked at a stone in the path, hard, and it bounced off into the grass on the side, lost to view. "He's so damned crooked I doubt he can even draw a straight line."

Shizune gaped at her and even Tonton made a little noise of puzzlement, turning her pink head up to look at Shizune, then back at Tsunade, her face wearing a pig's version of a frown. Tonton had napped by the entrance while they were inside, and was promptly scooped up by Shizune once they were out, the other woman apparently glad of something to hold. "What? You can't be talking about Sasuke-kun, ma'am."

"No, Yakushi. I don't want to talk about Uchiha; I don't even want to think about him until I have several drinks in me, especially since it seems that Yakushi wasn't lying for once when he warned her to stay away from him," she groused, frustration pulling her lips so thin they hurt. A wind was coming up, scattering leaves before them and carrying the faintest threat of winter chill; she pulled her jacket more tightly around her and shoved her hands deep into the pockets. "This is going to be a huge mess once Naruto finds out, and since no one from here is going to be running off to recover Yakushi, I'd rather think of him instead and delay the inevitable."

Shizune made a face at this, and shifted Tonton a little higher. "I don't know what to think," she said simply as they walked. "I mean, with him...but his being so--oh, I don't want to say 'nice' in reference to him, but there's not really another word--to Hinata, and he hurt her, he definitely hurt her, but at the same time--" Her voice broke off and she frowned and sighed, scratching Tonton's head absently. "Do you think he was trying to turn her to Sound?"

That made Tsunade laugh, if only for a moment. "Not really. To be unfairly blunt about it, she's too weak for them, and if he knew anything about her at all, he'd have known she'd rather die than turn. Hinata is Hinata, no matter what. Though," she admitted, "the thought crossed my mind that maybe--just maybe--she was supposed to be the Uchiha to his Orochimaru."

"But they're not even remotely the same, personality or circumstance-wise," Shizune pointed out. "Sasuke-kun went of his own free will, Hinata was captured. And it's not like Kabuto was going to take over her body. Besides, you said that you didn't think he was trying to turn her to Sound."

"Not to Sound. To him. Acting like she was his assistant, treating her like a royal hostage instead of a enemy prisoner. Maybe he's grooming a successor, even though Hinata never really had an interest in being a med-nin. Maybe he was bored and wanted a challenge." She stared up at the bright clouds drifting over the sky, dappled white and gold in the strong light. "Maybe...maybe..."

"Maybe what?" Shizune asked, a tiny touch of worry creeping into her voice when Tsunade failed to finish her sentence.

Tsunade looked down, exhaled a hard breath. "Maybe that's what I want to believe, even if there's no real evidence for it. Because, quite frankly, the other possibility turns my stomach and I doubt he's human enough to be capable of it," she said, and tried her damnedest not to think of a long-gone boy with a chilly, faint smile and long black hair, who she had loved and who might have, in his own strange way, tried to love her back.

_It's not the same, not the same at all. Poor Hinata..._


	7. Aconite, Bloom and Branch

AN: Just to make things perfectly clear, _Muma_ is an AU, branching off from right after Naruto rescues Gaara. In other words, recent manga developments that Kishimoto pulled out of his ass are being very fervently ignored and Kabuto in this fic is based entirely off his pre-355 characterization (you know, the one that Kishimoto essentially up and threw away when he sprung "Kabumaru" out at us). More on this in a rant coming very soon to a livejournal near you.

Also, I feel I should warn everyone that the next few chapters are going to be kind of rough for Hinata. I've never intended to shy away from the darker aspects of this story, and this _is_ Kabuto and Sound we're talking about here. So, uh, just prepare yourselves accordingly, because Hinata's not going to be having a happy time.

**Aconite (Bloom and Branch)**

_Neji pins her for the third and final time before Hinata calls a halt to their sparring: the sun is up and it is almost time to leave for her mission._

_"Lady Hinata, there's still a lot to work on," he tells her as he pulls her out of the dirt where she'd landed after his last successful blow: she doesn't answer, too busy panting softly, trying to catch her breath. "I wonder sometimes if we should concentrate instead on making you into a hit and run fighter, since you seem to lack the aptitude for sustained combat. You have the speed, but not the drive to attack, really attack. That will be your undoing."_

_She gets to her feet, leaning on his steadying hand and looks up at him with wide eyes, the pure white of her irises darker now with recrimination and sorrow. Watching those eyes, he can almost hear the march of her thoughts behind them: not good enough, never good enough, weak, pitiful, pathetic. Her pale skin is shiny with sweat. "Neji-niisan, I can't attack you in the way you want. I...could really hurt you..."_

_"Well, I won't know that for sure until you do, will I?" he snaps, then moderates his tone into something more forgiving when he sees the look on her face. He has to be harsh in order to force out her full potential, but harsh does not mean unbending."Don't worry about hurting me. Worry about knocking me clear into the other side of the compound. Nothing would make me happier than you breaking several of my ribs. Do you understand?"_

_That brings a tiny, uncertain smile to her lips: a firefly, blinking in and out of sight. In the guiltiest and most secret reaches of his soul, he has to sometimes admit that he--just maybe--cherishes the rare smiles she directs at him more than all of his considerable genius as a shinobi."I...yes."_

_They retreat to the veranda where breakfast and Hanabi wait, the little girl their eyewitness and eager student in one. Hanabi eats a dango in big, heavy bites, her knobby knees making a hill under the oversized white teeshirt she wears to school; she shifts position a little as Hinata and Neji approach and take their places on either side of her. All together they form a perfectly balanced triangle. _

_Hinata serves out breakfast from the plate in the center: three dango to him, two for herself. Hanabi has already claimed her share and is eating it as fast as grace allows._

_Neji glares at Hinata and drops the third dango back onto her plate. "You need the strength more than I. You have a mission, stop being foolish."_

_"I-it's not that big of a mission. Besides, you need to eat more, you're larger. I have a smaller stomach, so I don't need to eat as much," she says, and places the dango back with him._

_He passes it back to her plate and presses his hand down on it to keep it in place._

_That gets to her, and her mouth straightens into that line he knows so well, the one that means /i This isn't over, not by a long shot. i She nudges the dango out from his guarding hand and is attempting to send it back when Hanabi sighs through a mouthful of rice, intercepts the dango in midair and breaks it in half, putting one piece down on each plate._

_"Any questions?" she mumbles._

_They sit silent._

_"Good," she says, and leans up against Hinata's shoulder, inspecting the bruises on her sister's arm._

_His uncle materializes out of a doorway in a swirl of black and white robes just as Hinata is leaving. Hanabi hangs off her sister's back and presses noisy kisses onto her cheeks while Neji double-checks Hinata's pack to ensure that everything she needs is present and accounted for._

_"You are off, then?" Hiashi asks in his dry-ice tones, hands folded beneath the long ends of his sleeves. "To lead your mission."_

_Hinata nods and accepts her pack from Neji with a grateful smile (that's two), tightening the straps so it will hug her shoulders. "We should return in a day or so, Father."_

_Hiashi clears his throat and his hands shift a little underneath his robes. "Hmmph. Well then. Don't cause trouble for anyone. Be a good girl and be careful."_

_She looks up at him with surprise. "Of course I will, Father," she replies as she steps off the veranda and walks off towards the front gates, giving them all a last wave and smile before she slips outside._

_It is the last time Hinata will see her father alive._

oooooo

_Unforgivable_ was Neji's first thought when he woke, still seated on the damp and chilly grass outside the false ANBU office, shoulders stiff and back bent from his unexpected nap. _I should never be so careless. It's all Naruto's fault, him and his damn yawning. It put the wrong kind of thoughts in my mind._

He reactivated his Byakugan and looked downwards once more, but the act did nothing except confirm his suspicions: Hinata and the ANBU were long gone, with Hinata likely in bed for the night. How long had it been since he'd told Naruto to go home? Almost two hours by his watch, which meant roughly an hour spent napping, as he couldn't remember anything past eleven or so. Precious time lost to the unnecessary demands of sleep, even if he had been able to watch Hinata for five whole hours before losing her again.

Not for the first time, Neji wished that the Hyuuga had concentrated less on improving their already superior eyes and more on developing other useful body parts: superhuman hearing, perhaps. The Byakugan could peer through several hundred feet of heavy earth to see the aquamarine chakra signature of the girl hidden with; nothing could hide from it, save for sound and speech, air and thought. Hinata's chakra system had been shut down to the bare minimum necessary for life: to Neji's sharp eyes, she appeared as a fragile and shivery light, faint as breaking dawn, one overwhelmed by the far brighter ANBU around her, and when the Hokage was present, Neji could barely see her at all. A ghost girl reduced to sticks of blue light, a lifeline of twigs and branches, all weighter substance gone into the dark.

_But she's no ghost, she's alive_, he thought, as he rose and stretched his cramped limbs, stepping off the grass onto the path. _She is alive. That is the only thing that matters. As long as she's here, no matter what happened, I can help. I can make it up to her. _

oooooo

"This isn't my story to tell," the Hokage had said when he'd demanded news of Hinata on the second day of her return (protocol be damned, for just this once). She'd watched him with those hard, bright eyes of hers, the color of amber held in fire, her gaze scanning him slowly as if she already knew all his fears and merely looked for confirmation of them. "When she gets home, she'll tell you at her own time and her own pace. Do not, under any circumstances, try and force things out of her. Hinata's going to need peace and quiet and privacy, most of all. Understand?"

His face was heavy stone as he'd nodded, once: foolish of him to think they'd put his needs above village law, foolish to let so much of his self-control slip to an outsider, even if she was Hokage. But, a little voice inside him howled, she's been with _Kabuto Yakushi_ and you expect me to just take this burden and go away?

"Neji," Lady Tsunade had said just as he turned to leave; he paused and looked back at her, one hand steady on the door.

"She wasn't hurt," she said, putting a very slight emphasis on the word _hurt_. "Physically, she's pretty much unharmed. Keep that in mind, okay?"

The news did very little to ease him.

oooooo

_Three more days until she should return. Three more days until we learn exactly how extensive the damage is, and what must be done to help repair her_.

It was only when his jaw began to ache with a fierce throbbing pain that Neji realized his grinding teeth. _I won't let this ruin her._

_Especially when this is probably my fault._

His fingers slid into the hidden pocket sewn into his robes, rubbing gently against the smooth edged coins there, and without thinking he found himself turning down the dark and quiet path that led to not to home, but to the shrine.

Silk banners snapped in the wind as he approached, the wide marble path before him shining softly in the light of many lamps. No one else was present at this hour except the statue of Kannon, goddess of all mercy, her broad white face round with kindness, arms bent into arcs that suggested endless love. He tossed the coins into the offering box, clapped his hands three times, and bowed his head, silently giving thanks yet again that Hinata had been restored to them.

When the news of Hinata's disappearance had first reached the Hyuuga, Neji had outwardly stayed as stoic and unbending as his uncle had been until late night, when he slipped from his rooms and walked to the shrine as quickly as his legs would carry him, heart hammering in his chest. Heedless of any other worshipers that might be around, numbed by a thousand bright needles of anguish, he'd thrown himself down in front of the goddess and begged with all his soul: _Take me. Take me. I'm the one who has sinned, not her. Don't carry out my punishment by way of an innocent. If I am so wretched as to deserve something like this, then strike me down. Take me instead. _

_Please, just bring her back._

Ever since he'd nearly killed Hinata at the Chuunin exams, ever since Naruto had opened his eyes to the corruption his hatred had wrecked upon his heart, he'd been expecting this, a divine judgment, a bolt from the blue in retribution for his misplaced rage. Karma demanded that he be punished for his sins, of course, but he'd never meant for it to come about like this.

Hanabi had coped as best she could, first by hysterical fits, then with a kind of grim defiance once the initial bloom of misery had faded, the only one who truly seemed to believe that Hinata would eventually come back. As the days slipped by, Neji continue to plead with the goddess and leave offerings both at the official shrine and his tiny personal one at home but grew less and less certain, and turned from wishing for Hinata's safe return to asking that they at least recover her body.

Then came the day when Kisame Hoshigaki had stood upon the roof of the Hyuuga compound, grinning at them with all of his sharp, shining teeth, and said, in a tone of studied casualness: _You know, your missing girl's alive. We've seen her. Wandering around with Orochimaru's white rat. Limbs all intact and everything._

_Give us the Kyuubi and in exchange, we'll bring her back._

Hiashi Hyuuga merely stared at him in silence for a long moment, one hand protectively cupped on Hanabi's head as she huddled into his leg--_so like, so very like that time, Lady Hinata..._--then spoke in a voice that made Neji think of endless sheets of black ice:

_With no proof, you speak as if the Kyuubi is mine to give and act as if I should wholeheartedly believe the word of a criminal missing-nin and traitor in regards to my child. Regardless, I will not trade away a life that does not belong to me, even if it would bring my daughter back. I will not sacrifice the many for the one._

_Your offer is rejected. Do not trespass upon my property again._

So softly that only Neji could hear him as Hiashi turned away: _She would never forgive me if I did._

Before he left, he added another prayer, for his uncle's soul--_perhaps they're together again, Father and Uncle: if so, let them be eased, let them forgive_--and turned back towards home.

oooooo

It was a fairly short walk from the shrine to the compound where the clan had temporarily taken up residence while the estate was being rebuilt and Neji reached the main gate just as Konoha's clocks began to chime twelve.

He exchanged nods with the Branch members on guard duty, asked for news and was not greatly surprised to hear there was none. Passing into the tiny entranceway (which was flanked by two more guards, even though there was a grand total of six feet between the outer door and the main hall ) he bent to slip his shoes off when he heard her call out to him.

"Oniisan? Is that you?"

_Damnit, she shouldn't be awake still._ "I'm here, Lady Hanabi," he called back, knowing that she would resent the honorific, but it was best to keep it in situations where others could hear. "I'll be with you shortly," and thought he heard a faint but rudely insistent "hurry up!" in reply. Hanabi always saved her worst behavior for the people she loved, he thought, and smirked a little, inwardly.

There was a stick of golden lamplight on the floor in the dark hall, a paper door pushed partially open: Hanabi waited inside, bedside light blazing. The former Head of the Hyuuga held the largest suite of rooms in their borrowed lodgings but could only truly be said to occupy the six by five patch where her bed was kept and perhaps the water closet besides that. Hanabi did not suffer in silence.

Neji opened the door fully and walked inside with a stern mouth and raised eyebrow: Hanabi returned the look with one that plainly said Don't bother, Oniisan, and lowered the book she had been reading. The pulley holding her damaged leg in the air creaked as she squirmed to sit up a little straighter, her good leg hanging out of the covers and looking very white in the strong light.

"Hanabi, it's late," he said. "You should be sleeping."

"You're late," she said in reply, and closed the book (_True Tales of Spontaneous Human Combustion_, he noted with a sigh, one of the numerous horror pulps she loved and hid all over the Hyuuga estates) keeping one finger inside to mark her place. "Did...did something happen with Ane-ue?"

"No. Nothing beyond the ordinary. She seems well," he said, sinking down on the futon kept on the other side of the room for him when Hanabi felt lonely or afraid, which was more or less daily, now. Neji couldn't really blame her: first her sister lost to Sound and then her father and future as a ninja to Akatsuki in one blow, all the highest of the high and more than a little girl, even a very talented one, could hope to deal with on her own. Hanabi hadn't even graduated the Academy then and given the extent of her injuries now, she probably never would.

_Oniisan, let's go_, she'd said the night he'd caught her on the roof, one leg already over the fence that separated the Hyuuga from the outside world. _I can't wait here. No one will do anything and if this keeps going on, Ane-ue will..._ She'd choked back a sob then, soft and smothered against the cricket noises in the night. _I can't wait. I can't just sit here and stand this. Let's _go.

Hanabi shifted to face him, the scars from where they'd sewed the metal plate into her head gleaming dully through the fuzz of her returning hair, and rubbed the knuckles of one hand against her eyes. "How much longer?" she asked, voice starting to go blunt with weariness. She knew the answer as well as he did, but it was a nightly ritual and a comfort.

"Three days," he murmured, eyes counting the cracks in the ceiling as he struggled to keep them open. _Since when have I been so tired?_ "Just three more days."

Neji heard the covers rustle and the pulley squeak as Hanabi moved around in bed, the soft thud as she placed the book on her nightstand. "Well, let's go to sleep so it'll be faster then," she murmured and snapped off the light.

"Oniisan?" he heard Hanabi say a little later, her voice tiny, as if the words were straining to meet him over a great distance. "Do you know what I think would be nice? If, after Ane-ue comes home, we could go on a visit somewhere so she could relax. Somewhere outside the Five Countries, a place that's really far away from here. Do you think Ane-ue would like that? Seeing another country, a new place?"

"More than anything in the world, yes," he thought he said in reply, and lost himself completely.

oooooo

_Three more days of this, and I can go home_, Hinata thought as she lay in bed, separated from the ANBU watching her by a thick sheet of iron grill. _I'm tired of being surrounded by strangers._

She stared at the dark stone squares that made up the wall beside her bed, unable to call sleep and very conscious of the watchers at her back. _Life is...funny, sometimes. In a way, I had more freedom at Sound than I do here. I made my own food, ate when I wanted, chose my own clothes. Went outside when I wanted. And everyone...mostly...stayed away from me._

_I shouldn't be thinking such foolish things, even if I am locked down more tightly here._

But this particular _here _would eventually release her while Sound had loomed endless until the day of her surprise escape. _Three more days, plus who knows how many more months of ANBU watching and waiting and prying. _

_No, this will not end here. And Sound hasn't gone away either._

Yesterday (or had it been the day before? time ran together so, in this place) Ibiki Morino had been in the middle of interrogating her when a new and unfamiliar ANBU had slipped into the room, to drop a piece of paper at Morino's elbow. He'd picked the paper up, scanned it with a tight-lipped scowl, then let it flutter to the desk again.

"Well," he'd said, watching her with narrow eyes that gave away nothing but scornful impatience. "It seems that despite Kakashi's best efforts, Yakushi is still among the living after all."

Though a small part of her mind reminded her that Morino could just as easily be lying, she'd started shaking all on her own at his words, no need to feign it.

"Not gone...T-that means he'll be back. To try and kidnap me again, won't he," she'd whispered and wrapped her arms around herself, working her shuddering into a near-fit so strongly that they'd had to call off the interrogation for the afternoon. She was not terribly surprised when they'd let her upstairs the next day.

Even if it had touched on the subject of secrets far too much for her liking, the interrogation with the Hokage this morning hadn't been too bad, although Hinata was sorry that she had upset Ms. Shizune so badly. Lady Tsunade's presence was always a comfort as she radiated the strength she'd held on to despite bitterness: more importantly, she'd not only lived with the darkness that made up the heart of Sound, she'd beaten him to a pulp in a fight. Hinata had soaked up that strength as much as she could, pulling in reinforcements for later and tried to see that the Hokage talked more than she listened. She'd released some of the smaller scraps of horror she'd collected during her time at Sound, glad to let them go, nodded at the news of her friends, and not mentioned the tiny slip of paper--which read, simply, _We've missed you_--- borne by two ants that had mysteriously appeared by her hand as she lay in bed the other night, or the bug she'd found crawling on her arm shortly after that. Before Shizune and Tsunade had come, it had been sitting behind her ear; after, it crouched on her shoulder or walked a little spiral around her left arm, a pepper speck hidden under the fabric of her shirt. At the moment, it was sitting on her collarbone and she raised a finger to gently stroke it.

That was one secret. There were others, much larger and far more troublesome, not meant for public consumption; these were bolted down fast in the reaches of her furthest self with clasps of iron and chains of steel, heavy with hope girded in lead and her own quiet request that they not rise up again. Most of them had to with him. In the beginning, his non-medically derived touches had been rare, quick and light; pinching the seams of her kimono straight, fastening her hair back up into the clip when he claimed it had been about to fall, his motions so deft that she had felt nothing until it was done and he was already stepping away. All the same, just knowing about those small, benign touches would give people the wrong idea.

In that light, Hinata had decided quite a while ago that Interrogation did not need to know about the incident at the lake with the leeches, or that Kabuto had spent the last three nights leading up to her rescue lying beside her in bed, or about the chaste kiss he'd dropped on her cheek, casually excusing it as a distraction, just before he'd gone in her form to destroy the Cloud nin who had tried to buy her away from Sound. How everyone in Otogakure, including Sasuke-kun, had assumed he was sleeping with her. Then again, given the way the Morino had reacted when she'd returned, probably everyone in Konoha assumed he'd been sleeping with her as well. It was simply the sad hazard of a kunoichi's life.

A hazard she'd escaped...mostly...

She exhaled quietly, with the hope that the ANBU on watch hadn't noticed: her head was starting to ache. It was fine for them to know about the pain, the pinching and probing, how he'd drawn blood from her daily, his brief stint at poisoning her, the myriad ways he'd hurt her when she'd made her ill-starred attempt at running away (_ah, let me count the bones he'd break_), his torturous efforts at examining her eyes. The fact that she'd been retrieved mostly unscathed, still relatively sound in body and mind, was an obnoxious puzzle that ANBU kept turning in their hands during her interrogations, hoping to find the piece that wasn't there before, the one marked why. (They'd made a deal of sorts, she and he: the terms all laid out neat and correct in his softly reasonable voice--_where there's life, there's hope._) Let them take the pain, she willed, and pray that it kept their minds off other things.

Not that much had happened._ And I really shouldn't be thinking about such...things. All they can do here is get me into trouble_. Even so, she deserved some privacy in the darkness of her own mind, she decided, and stretched an arm over the pillow in a vain attempt to get more comfortable.

Movement flickered at the grill: one of her ANBU watchers had turned to peer at her. "You seem very restless, my lady."

"It's nothing," she said quietly: _nothing_, one of the bywords of her new life. "I just have a little headache and it's making it hard for me to sleep. That's all."

A pause, then the ANBU turned completely around, resting one hand on the lattice that separated them. "Is it very bad? I could fetch you a remedy..."

Hinata weighed the idea of sleep, easy and without pain (and possibly without dreams as well; more of a lure than an escape from the pain) against the idea of a drug that might loosen her tongue and let her ramble, all unawares, in her sleep, her many secrets spilling forth like water from a split vessel to soak into the parched ears of her watchers. She lay, and wove the two possibilities into a coil for so long the ANBU grew irritated and turned away again, just as she timidly made her request: yes, she did want something for her head, thank you very much for the kind offer. He was a long time coming back.

The powders he handed her were so bitter she drank all of her available water on the first packet and had to ask for more; the second packet was poured into her lap with a neat slight-of-hand, where the fine grains would be indistinguishable from the white bedclothes and Shino's ants could take care of the rest, her compromise on the matter. Their fault for not watching her more closely.

By the time she finished drinking her second water the drug was already bearing down on her, the weight of it like hands pressing in at her temples, making her veins throb. It had to be something truly potent if it was affecting her so quickly: she'd been exactly right to dispose of the other then, assuming that she never got caught.

Hinata breathed softly, in and out, as she lay her aching head back down onto the pillow and felt herself begin to turn inward, mind trying to pivot over the edge of sleep as filaments of panic wove through her, wrapping a steel net around her heart and sending it racing. She couldn't let herself fall, not in this unguarded state. _Not like this, they'll catch me this way!_

Nerves bruised by panic, she floundered helplessly in the dark, casting around for something to hide behind, a strong place to shield her. Then there was a sudden bright snap of remembrance: somewhere inside her a door, a pocket, a vault of steel that was the perfect spot to go when things went really bad (_fathers who tell you they want you dead, people who hate you simply for being you, your own frail and bedraggled and stunted self, boys who caressed you with words and long fingers on your breasts, who smiled and smiled and there wasn't the slightest thing soft about them_) The one place in the world where there was room for nothing and no one other than Hinata: she could crawl in there, pulling her consciousness in after her, tucking it all in as neatly as a snail into its shell and be perfectly safe.

Yes, that would be just right.

She shut her eyes and descended.

oooooo

_Oh_, was her first thought upon touching bottom. _This isn't right. I'm back here again._

Hinata looked down at the sleeping girl, burrowed underneath the blankets of the narrow bed despite the heat, one arm upflung as if to shield her face from light that never came. It was dawn or very nearly in the little room that smelled of wet earth and darkness; the sleeve that fell back from the sleeper's wrist was a murky blue-grey like oceanwater churning in a storm and she knew beyond all doubt that her feet were now planted in the memory of the day she'd been rescued.

_So soon. I don't know if I wanted to come back so soon. Why is __**this**__ here, of all places? I thought...I was getting away..._

She very much wanted to touch herself, to find out if her other self was solid or nothing but a dream-husk (made of moonbeams and cobwebs, perhaps...she looked opaque enough) but fear of what might happen if she did kept her fingers still. Would she wake up looking at herself and if so, which mind would she think with? Hers, the other, or both at the same time? No, better not to risk it.

A shiver stuttered through her body and she wrapped her arms around herself, tight.

Kabuto's side of the bed was empty, lightly rumpled blankets and a lingering warmth the only sign of his presence. He never stayed for very long, a few hours at most, and slept less than he stayed, a side effect of his needing to be here, there and everywhere in Otogakure. No rest for the weary, he'd said, as he'd shone a light in her eyes, free hand probing for another vein. That's why I appreciate your compliance.

It was probably better that he was gone, she decided: if the thought of waking up to herself was terrifying, finding Kabuto there, awake and looking back was even more so. _He'd see me. I know he would._

Minutes rolled by slowly as Hinata waited for the scene, or herself, to shift, feeling like a balloon bobbing lightly on a current. She was just about to see if she could move past the doorway in her current state when there was movement from the bed and her other self rose, shook the bedclothes back and stepped out.

She didn't seem to notice Hinata as she walked slowly around the room, loosening her hair from its sleeping braid, pulling off one blue-grey robe to exchange it for another. (Kabuto got all her clothing secondhand and never said from where: all she'd wanted to know was that they weren't the castoffs of Sound victims. His response was a soft smile and nothing further. By the time she'd been rescued, she'd acquired quite a wardrobe.) Slipping on sandals, she finally opened the door and stepped outside, making her way down the narrow little hall towards the kitchens, Hinata following quietly behind.

_Yes, this is exactly what I did. I remember. _ Her other self unlocked the kitchen door with a key taken from her sash and walked over the chipping floor tiles to the tiny squeaking refrigerator, brought out the onigiri made the night before. _It was Moving Day and that's why no one else was around. I didn't think it was strange until I heard the screaming._

As if cued by her thoughts, a thunderclap ripped into the silence, followed by yelling and then explosions that made the kitchen chairs wobble on the uneven floor. The door slammed shut.

Past Hinata froze for a long moment, eyes wide and a half-eaten onigiri clutched in her hand, then threw the food aside and yanked the door open, running for the outside.

Hinata, who already knew perfectly well what was going to happen--what had happened--followed at a more sedate pace. _I was going to find Mr. Kabuto, but then I saw the fighting outside._

She reached the end of the hall and peered out at the clearing that marked the beginning of Otogakure, covered by rolling smoke, Leaf forces swarming all over. Past Hinata stood uncertain in the shade of a large boulder, clutching her hands against her heart, listening to faint words drift past on the smoke. Her head turned to the right, staring at something hidden by the fights.

_Hinata! Hinata! Where are you? Hinata!_

In one sudden movement, Past Hinata wrenched her gaze away and started running, her voice rising above her pounding footsteps--_I'm here, I'm here, Naruto-kun, I'm here!_--and vanished into the smoke.

_And with that, I ran away._

Silence settled back over the clearing, though the fighting was still going on: Hinata could see shadows leaping, stabbing, falling, starbursts of chakra glittering through the air. Kunai studded the ground like iron grass. She braced herself, stepped out from the door, and knowing already what lay at the end of the other route, this time turned to the right.

Blood was the first thing that met her eyes; Kabuto was supplying most of it. Kakashi-sensei lunged at him, kunai in hand, and Kabuto dodged it by the merest inch, slipping down clumsily on his own blood. Another blow caught Kabuto on his arm, raking a new gash and he fell back a few steps, no longer smiling.

_His hands are empty. His chakra scalpel...why isn't he using it?_ The more sensible part of her mind informed her that she hadn't witnessed this fight and could not possibly know what had happened beyond that moment when she'd locked eyes with Kabuto as he knelt bleeding on the ground. Kakashi-sensei had noticed her, jerked his chin towards Naruto and Neji-niisan without taking his own eyes off Kabuto and she'd obeyed the silent injunction without looking back.

The two men sprang at each other again, with Kabuto coming off worst once more. _This isn't right. This can't be right._ Kabuto had fought more strongly then this during their infrequent sparring matches and she was nowhere near his and Kakashi's level. _It's almost like...he's not even trying..._

Kakashi-sensei surely realized it too, because he spoke suddenly, his words tight and suspicious. "What are you up to now, you cocky little brat?"

That brought a smile back to Kabuto's face: through it, he coughed and spat blood on the ground. "Maybe I don't want your Sharingan copying all my tricks."

"Try again. You're fighting like a civilian with two broken legs _and I want to know why_."

Kabuto just shook his head and kept smiling, even as Kakashi-sensei went for his throat and Hinata cried out, unable to stop herself. A dull thud, an arc of metal that gleamed like obsidian and Kakashi-sensei was flying back, his face drawn in shock. Orochimaru's Kusanagi buried in his torso like a third arm.

"Kushinada. I knew I'd find you here."

The maelstrom died at the sound of his voice: figures, weapons, smoke and solids all went stiff and bright, like little cutouts made of sun, then flared up and vanished, leaving nothing but the landscape, herself, and Kabuto, standing at the edge of the path, watching her out of unprotected eyes.

One unprotected eye, to be specific: the other was bandaged heavily, blood-speckled white crossing over his skull like the thick hats the Sand-nin sometimes wore to protect themselves from the sun. His left arm was swaddled as well, and in a sling; the longer Hinata looked, the more bandages she saw and the greater the extent of his damage.

"You're...hurt..."

He looked at her shocked face for a long moment, then smiled his sweet, mutable smile. "Am I so altered?" he asked lightly. "Don't be frightened. I was getting complacent, after all: it's not good to let yourself become too easy with anything. I needed to be reminded about pain again. Besides, you know me. Wounds always heal, given enough time."

"That's not always true," she whispered, eyes on the bandages at his left shoulder, where a bloodstain puddled one minute, then ebbed away the next. "W-what happened to you...?"

"Lord Orochimaru happened to me," he replied, as easy as if he was discussing the weather. "Someone had to suffer for the Leaf attack, and we lost so many men that it was only practical that I take the brunt of his anger, lest we have any shinobi left at all. And I...well, never mind." Kabuto's chuckle was rueful and light, very close to her ear. _Wasn't he just at the end of the path? _"He's forbidden me healing for the next three days. It's sweet of you to care, though."

"And what about you, Miss Hinata? What have you been up to?" He pursed his lips, thinking, then went on without waiting for her answer, peering over her head as if he could see her ANBU waiting there, looking back. "Of course. Standard ANBU debriefing 3B, category 0107-A, for recovered shinobi who have been with the enemy as prisoners of war for five days or longer, a procedure set up by the Second Hokage after his own sister was taken by enemy nin during an S-class mission. Heavy on the interrogation, light on the torture, because you haven't _really_ done anything wrong, but my goodness, will they do their damnedest to ferret everything out. How are you enjoying yourself, by the way?"

"P-probably more than you are, at the moment," she managed to say, and his half-smile widened into the arching bow she knew so well.

"I've missed you, Kushinada-hime," he said as he settled to his knees with a sigh, his back against the stone wall of Otogakure as if he couldn't support his own weight any longer. "It's not nearly the same without my blackbird flitting around, but I suppose it couldn't be helped." His gaze went inward for a moment, visible eye cloudy with something that might have been sadness, or an excellent imitation, but he recovered quickly enough and patted the spot next to him with an inviting hand. "Won't you come sit?"

Hinata added his words and the look to her ever-expanding Kabuto-catalog of speech and deed, then went to his good side.

Their shoulders bumped companionably as Hinata indulged his request, but she drew away almost immediately at the contact and kept her arms and legs tucked in tight, resting her chin on the bent column of her knees. He was just as warm as she remembered, full of an overspilling heat that soaked into anything he came into contact with. _Especially me._

Kabuto drummed the fingers of his good hand on his own knee and watched her without comment, while Hinata maintained the silence in turn, trying to keep her eyes on her folded hands instead of his face. A tiny bead of sweat slipped down her neck, leaving a cooling trail on her skin.

"Miss Hinata," he finally said, his tone soft and pointed, leaning forward until she was forced to look directly at him, at his one unguarded eye. "Is there something wrong? Am I making you uncomfortable? You shouldn't be, after everything we've been through together."

She looked away, at the short curves of her nails, the blunt ends of her fingers tapping together. "...I was getting too comfortable with you. With everything. But that was the idea, wasn't it? Your plan all along. I...I think I see now. I think."

He came closer still, their noses almost touching, voice still low and even. "Oh?"

_Better not to give him any advantage,_ she thought, and kept her silence. It was one of the better ways she'd found for dealing with him, though like all of her tactics it had a limited lifespan: retreat for too long and he'd start throwing around words like _curse seal_ and _childbirth _until he saw that he had her undivided attention again.

When she failed to respond, Kabuto lifted his hand and placed it, very lightly, on her hair.

Hinata jerked at the touch and nearly darted away, but thought better of it, pressing her lips together until they hurt. "I...you shouldn't..."

Kabuto's smile was indulgent and just a touch exasperated as his fingers separated the strands. "Is that so? That's not what you said that night. You remember that, don't you? I did far more than just touch your hair then. Now you're shaking like a frightened rabbit. What happened to my brave Kushinada-hime?" His next words went directly into her ear. "Has ANBU poisoned your mind already? Or am I scaring you?"

"I've never stopped being scared of you," she said wearily, suddenly very tired of all this evasion and doublespeak and his hand went still for a moment; then he made an indistinct noise down in his throat and continued to stroke her hair. The gesture itself was soothing, but the feelings it engendered were not.

"And yet," he said, very quietly after a little silence had passed, "you chose to sit on the side of me that isn't damaged."

A wisp of scent tickled her nose, heavy and sweet, blurring her thoughts and making her sleepy. She needed to find some breathing space or her mind would dissolve entirely and he'd do exactly as he pleased with her, gulp her down whole like the river beasts from Mist that Hanabi liked to read about. It took a lot of effort to pull away from his hand, but she managed and walked away, hands clenched at her side.

"I see. You no longer intend to keep your promise," he said flatly, from right behind her. _Of course he'd follow._ "Is that it?"

She shook her head in immediate denial before she remembered that Kabuto had a serious dislike for nonverbal replies. "N-no. That's not true. I-I meant what I said," she whispered, staring off into the horizon as her face flushed, glad she was facing away. "I meant what I said," she repeated, her voice stronger now that she no longer had to look at him. "I keep my promises and settle my debts. That's my honor as a Hyuuga. I won't go back on that."

"I didn't say you were," he said, his voice full of gentle rebuke: he was very suddenly in front of her and moving closer with each step. "But the scales are unbalanced, aren't they? The weight of your debt dragging you down?" His smile gleamed metal-bright as he counted off, curling his fingers into his palm as he went. "One, two, three, four near-deaths, Miss Hinata. If this keeps up, I'm going to own you 'till the end of time."

Her heart beat like a festival drum and he turned his soft smile down to her. "Don't let it worry you. I take very good care of my things, as you already know."

"You d-don't. Own me, that is. And you won't, after I repay you for everything. Once that's done..."

"And if I save you again? And again, and again? Keep telling yourself that things will someday end between us, Miss Hinata, if it eases your soul," he said kindly, standing so close to her that she could feel the cloth of his sleeve against the bare skin of her arm. One heartbeat later, he was reaching out to splay his long fingers over the hollow between her breasts, pressing down lightly against her heart. "But you've already cracked a little _here_, haven't you? Admit it: I'm already inside you. I don't need much room and you have so much space inside. Just a tiny corner that no one else wants, that's all I ask."

Hinata swayed--that scent was becoming so much stronger, ash and honey all in one turn--then reached up and pressed her hand to his cheek, knowing from experience that Kabuto shied away from having his face touched.

He didn't flinch as she hoped, but went very still. Yet under her fingers Hinata felt something _thrum _at her touch, a ripple breaking through calm water. His good eye narrowed, searching her out and Hinata met his gaze for a minute, then dropped gaze and hand both to the pulse that beat at the hollow of his throat. There was a tenketsu point at that spot capable of blowing a man's head off his shoulders if enough force was applied but his heartbeat never changed.

The wind shifted again, waves of spice prickling her nose and again came the overwhelming sleepiness. Something warm brushed against her calves and she looked down, heavy-eyed, and saw that they stood knee-deep in fire, a bright field of burning poppy with them in the center, sparks drifting upward to gild the air with sweet-smelling gold.

Kabuto's hand closed around her elbow. "You can't go to sleep here: you'll go into the dream so far you'll never come out again," and she thought there was a touch of urgency in his voice. "Let's find more congenial surroundings, all right?"

Her eyes must have closed for a second because the next thing she saw was sunlight glinting off surgical tools and beakers lined in rows. This was a familiar place: dark cabinets and shelves crammed with books and jars and stuffed animals, the sunniest windowsill groaning under the heavy pots of poison flowers with the lone benign violet sitting forlornly in the center, papers strewn on every available surface. Hinata averted her eyes from the skeleton with the missing left arm that hung from one corner, looked for and spotted the vials of blood neatly stacked and labeled with her own name on one of the far counters. (It always gave her a queer feeling to see them lined up so precisely: when she'd asked him why he needed all that blood, he'd given her an odd look and said "For future contingencies", a point that had been driven home once Orochimaru had attacked her.)

Kabuto sat her down in his desk chair and knelt before her, slapping her cheeks, gently at first, then with increasing force until she sat up more fully and looked at him without blinking. "Good," he said. "I don't want you leaving me."

It felt strange having him at her feet like this. "I did leave though," she murmured, and he patted her hand as if she was a senile old grandmother trying her hardest to remember which child was this. "Keep telling yourself that."

A pen rolled off his desk and hit the floor, and suddenly his good arm was full of flowers. "Here," he said, handing her the bouquet. "I have something for you."

Kabuto had given her flowers plenty of times, but they were always to be ground into poison or pulverized into medicines that would help Konoha's enemies grow strong: this one was a riot of pinks and lavenders and whites, aconite and lilies, amaranth, laurel, rue. Her grip on the flowers was a little too strong and she crushed some of the amaranth petals beneath her hands, the sticky juice running crimson down her fingers.

"A love like blood," he said with a smile, and leaned up against her until she could see herself as a perfect miniature in his eye.

She closed her own and let him.

His lips were warm and smooth, just as she'd always thought they'd be and this first kiss was surprisingly gentle and hesitant. _Not surprising. It's the way he operates. I should know by now._ She didn't notice which of them was the first to open their mouth, too busy curling her fingers into his thick hair for a better grip.

Kabuto pulled his tongue away after a short eternity, panting slightly and looked up at her, his eye wide and wet. "Hinata...?" he said, sounding young and frightened and uncertain all in one word, the skin flushed pale rose over the rise of his visible cheekbone.

_He's...probably faking it._

_But, I want to kiss him again._

_I need to._

_It's all right if it's just a dream._

Kabuto licked his wet lips and she yanked on his hair, pulling him back to her mouth as the petals spilled between them and all the lights suddenly went out.

Wind as cold as lunar ice swept over her, chilling her to the bone, and something very large moved, rustling, in the darkness before them. Far above their heads, two suns slashed with ebony winked at them and a tongue a mile long flicked out to taste the frigid air. _Well, well. What do we have here?_

Hinata's muscles locked at the sight and she sat stiffly staring, but Kabuto clutched her hand so hard it felt like he would crack the bone, his face twisted with horrified fury. "No. No. Get away from me. Get out! Must you ruin everything? OUT!"

The snake's golden eyes barely flickered and it rasped a long dry snort. _You left a door wide open and are surprised when something decides to step through? Be reasonable._

A shudder ran through the hand holding hers: Kabuto was trembling, and then suddenly gone, leaving her alone with the serpent. It curled its neck and leaned even closer to her, breath hot and arid as desert wind exhaling from its nostrils, blanketing her body and melting the ice away. She noticed, through the stillness of absolute fear, that its pupils were taller than she was and for some funny reason, she felt as if she had met this snake before.

_I'm glad to see you two are getting along so well together. I like her, you know_.

There was nothing left except the darkness and the burning embers that marked out the serpent's eyes.

_I like her so much._

oooooo

It took both of the ANBU guards to hold her down while a third called for a medic as she screamed: when all of their efforts proved futile, they finally called for the Hokage. Only after Lady Tsunade arrived and wrapped her warm arms around her, holding her close, did Hinata's maelstrom of tears finally subside enough for her to sleep.


	8. Put On Your Red Shoes and Flee

**Muma VII: Put On Your Red Shoes And Flee**

_This is the dream she tells to Lady Tsunade: running through the forest, leaving bright red footsteps behind, her bare feet crusted with mud and blood. She pants as she runs, great harsh wheezing breaths that scrape at her lungs and burn her throat but she pushes herself on: faster, faster, mustn't be left behind._

_Home is at the end of the white path between the trees, the path that she is embroidering with blood and breath but the forest seems endless and she is running on borrowed time. Sure enough, the beast is behind her even as she speaks and she wonders briefly if Tsunade can see it too. Sometimes it is dark and furry; other times it wears a black cloak and a mask and once it even had a snake's head, but its shape is not very important. It slips through the trees as if they are water._

_The beast lopes behind her, staying at her heels, patient, never overtaking her. This is a true thing as well: when she ran in reality, he simply followed until she could be run to ground in the dry lake-bed. Betrayed once again by her weakness, her raw feet opening him a path. The light ahead suddenly brightens and Hinata knows that this dream is coming to an end._

_She skids and stumbles in the mud, blinded by the light, but she makes her way to the far end and turns to face him before he leaps. She must always see him face to face, mustn't turn her back, mustn't ignore. Facing forward, she goes down in a tempest of mud and fur as he begins to tear the flesh from her body._

_"Oh, I knew it, I knew it all along," she cries out in equal amounts of terror and triumph as he takes her to pieces. "I always knew that this is how you really are!"_

_Lady Tsunade is far too quiet after Hinata tells her this, but Hinata is still dozy and half-dreaming, pressed close against Lady Tsunade's warmth and doesn't particularly care. She dreamily decides not to mention that Kabuto sometimes held her like this, her face to his shoulder, his hands on her thighs. The day before the last one, when she had climbed the broken staircase to see him at his perch in the leaning watchtower, her belly wracked with the menstrual cramps that made each step torture, but she'd done it and his remote expression briefly changed to one of approval before he pulled her onto his lap, hands sending away the pain. It was silly for her to be shy, considering what she'd promised him only two days before and the way they had lain together last night, but the kiss he'd pressed to the top of her head nearly made her jump._

_Silly, weak girl, she'd scolded herself but Kabuto was still staring out at the trees and didn't seem to notice, or mind._

_Hinata thinks for a minute, then asks Lady Tsunade if there are any jutsu that can see inside a person's mind._

_"...A few," the Hokage replies after a heartbeat, her tone carefully neutral. "Most are meant to help people out of deep psychological trauma. Or cause it."_

_She mulls that over for a bit. So, there aren't any that can reveal a person's truth? she asks, feeling disappointed. What they're really thinking?_

_Tsunade's mouth twists with suspicion and maybe a little bit of disapproval. "One or two, but if the person is exceptionally skilled at concealing their true thoughts, then their effectiveness takes a pretty sharp nosedive," she says. "And people lie all the time to themselves, you know: if they truly believe something it'll register as truth even if it isn't. There's a...the only way to really know anything would be if you slipped inside someone's mind, merged with their consciousness almost completely. You'd have to practically become them. Needless to say, that jutsu is extremely dangerous, both to the caster and to the recipient."_

_The Hokage shifts for a bit, then adds: "So don't get any ideas."_

_"I don't think I have the power to perform anything like that anyway," Hinata whispers. For some reason, tears are filling her eyes: she blinks them away and presses closer to Tsunade, hiding her damp face in the curve of the Hokage's shoulder. "Though, I think...that it would be good for him to have to tell the truth for once."_

oooooo

Everything about this escape attempt was far too simple, but people had been done in by their own cleverness before, and Hinata was too desperate to give up even a bad chance if it meant she might escape.

At Sound, a week had passed: at least, Hinata guessed it to be a week. Her days slid by, identical beads clacking on a string: she woke when the light outside was still thin and grey and slipped from bed to use the bathroom, bunching her robe as close to her body as possible and trying very hard not to think about spyholes and watching eyes. While she was in the bathroom, her breakfast was brought and left on the table by the bed, the bearer always gone before she came back, the food plain but filling. Rice and beans, water to drink. Sometimes broth or a dumpling; she guessed Otogakure felt generous on those days and wondered what the catch was. Hinata ate, stacked the dishes neatly in place and sat for a while with her knees to her chest, arms wrapped closely for warmth, pondering poison and watching the light from the window move slowly across the cold floor.

Once she survived another meal, she would rise again and move through her forms, a cloud of breath following her through the chilly air, and practice until her muscles ached and sweat poured down her back. She was still shuddery and weak from her injuries, fearful and enervated but she set her teeth and worked for the time she could escape, hands cutting the shadows around her as her feet turned on the floor.

Lunch arrived not long after she ended her exercises, brought by the same person every day; a hunchbacked dwarf with wild white hair, wearing something that might have been a lab coat or--from certain angles--a straitjacket, torn to shreds at the hem and shoulders. He, too, followed a pattern: with a grunt, he'd set the food down on the table with a smack that sent the dishes clattering, wave a hand at her dismissively and shuffle out, slamming the door behind him. Hinata had twenty minutes to eat before he returned to take the dishes away (the first time, she'd been too slow and he'd pushed her away from the food so hard she'd fallen: he'd taken her unfinished food with a snort of annoyance and then snickered when he noticed her lying at his feet) and then more hours to fill with practice until the sun set and dinner came.

She'd tried to talk to the dwarf, once. "I-I'm really very sorry, but if you could...could you just tell me which day it is...?" she'd whispered as he bent next to her to gather up the dinner tray, eyes looking not at him but somewhere off to the side in case someone outside was watching. "I-If you c-could...if you c-can 't, I understand..."

His hands slowed and she saw him turn to look at her, then turn back to the dishes, shuffling them back and forth on the tray as if he was telling a fortune with them. After a moment of rattling dishes, he seemed to come to a decision and tapped her abruptly on the shoulder, making her jump. "Y-yes...?"

"_Hnnuhhh_!" he roared, and opened his mouth wide.

The dwarf's tongue was nothing more than a blackened stump set far back in his mouth: he couldn't have spoken if he wanted to. Grinning hugely at her stricken expression, he waggled it back and forth a few times for emphasis, then made another _hnuh_ sound, but this one was softer and more satisfied. Patting her shoulder, he showed her three fingers, collected the dishes and strode off, closing the door gently behind him.

Hinata sat frozen, hands clasped tightly together in her lap to hide their shaking. Three? Three what? Three o'clock? That didn't seem right. It couldn't be March 3rd yet, could it? It had been February...February 15th when they'd left Konoha, hadn't it, and so much time couldn't have passed yet, it just couldn't have...

(She never spoke to the dwarf again after that and tried to be out of the room when he came, but she had only one other place to go and he seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of where she was (or else he was spying on her before he came inside, something Hinata did not want to think too much about): every time she stepped out of the bathroom after staying in there for as long as she dared, he came stomping in, smirking at her downcast eyes.)

The issue of time pressed down on her all the rest of that day and into the evening: she lay awake when she should have been sleeping, staring at the faint bands of moonlight on the wall. Kabuto hadn't been in once to see her since he'd taken her to bathe and that had been several days ago, if not a full week past. It was impossible that he would let the chance to examine her eyes slip by; even if by some miracle they meant to ransom her back to Konoha, he would take all he could from her eyes first. She would forever go down in the history of the clan as not only the weakest Heir, but the one who had let the secret of the Byakugan out. A disgrace; maybe she would even be stricken out of the records like the Heir who had gone against the family and run away to marry a woman the clan deemed unworthy, then killed himself along with his wife rather than return to the family when the clan tracked them down. Disgraceful. Disaster. Her uncle Hizashi's death would be for nothing. Hinata's palms were sweating so badly the moisture soaked through her robe and left a hot, wet patch on her stomach. She couldn't stay here like this.

_I have to escape. _

She was still weak though, still without her chakra and escaping without some kind of weapon for backup under these conditions seemed like a very bad idea. She had no idea of Otogakure's layout aside from the small glimpse she'd had on the way to the baths, no clue about where guards might be stationed or doors might be locked. The window showed her what looked like part of a forest, empty of people, but the window was solidly barred and for all she knew, the scenery was simply an elaborate genjutsu meant to confuse her. There was nothing in the room aside from her bed and the table: the stool had been taken out early on and the table was rickety and small, the legs crooked spindles that looked like they would break if the wind blew on them too harshly. Three small candles sat high on the wall next to her bed for illumination at night, but they were completely covered with thick, shatterproof safety glass and Hinata could see where the back panel was hinged so someone outside could replace the candles without coming into the room. _It's...clever, really. _

Her fingers clenched again and again, the muscles spasming. Centuries of Byakugan users, descended from the princess Suzume and the God in the Forest, from their son Hikaru the Mighty, all unbowed, eyes inviolate. Kabuto wasn't only getting his hands on one of the most powerful bloodlines in the entire world, he would also have the distinction of being the first outsider to break the secrets of the Byakugan wide open. And for who? Orochimaru, who wanted the destruction of Konoha almost more than he wanted his immortality. Konoha, which had been built on Hyuuga land. Hinata shook, soundlessly.

_Even death...even dying won't stop him. I must escape. I must. But I don't know how... _

_...If Kakashi-sensei couldn't stand up to them, what chance do I have? What could I possibly do, even most jounin would be frightened out of their mind here and I'm just a chuunini'mnotstrongenoughwhatcanido..._

_STOP IT! Acting like this won't help anything!_

_Just stop, just stop, oh please, just stop._

The tremors wouldn't stop, but her shivering muscles made Hinata think of something, a memory tugged out of hiding with the stories of her ancestral line. It was possible, she vaguely remembered hearing, to unseal blocked chakra points through willpower alone. The chakra in her body hadn't been erased: it was simply bottled up, waiting for an opening. Someone with good chakra control--like a Hyuuga--could push at the trapped chakra, move it around the body without releasing it and finally channel it against the blockage until the sheer force snapped the tenketsu open. She knew exactly where her tenketsu were: it was something of a rite for Hyuuga to map them out for themselves once they achieved a Byakugan skilled enough to see them. Her eyes weren't Neji's, but they were much improved. She knew her chakra lines. Her power wasn't gone, merely stilled. If so...

She breathed out, flexed her cramped fingers and closed her eyes.

oooooo

_Flow. Fingertip to palm and back again. Flow. Fall with me and rise again. My lifebeat, my heartbeat, such as you are. Come with me. Flow._

oooooo

When the sun rose, Hinata forced herself out of bed and stumbled into her morning routine, doing her best to pretend she hadn't been awake all night undoing the seals upon her body. She trained and ate with fingertips that prickled at odd moments like a tiny swarm of bees traveling over her skin and waited all day for someone to say something, for Kabuto to suddenly appear and remark on the bags under her eyes or the dwarf to look at her with suspicious curiosity instead of grim amusement. Nothing.

She went to bed and slept for a few hours, then woke and went at it again, tapping and tugging on her tenketsu as if they were stubborn children. Tiny fires sprouted under her skin but her gates remained firmly closed, without even the tiniest chink to encourage her.

In the morning, her hands were covered with red spots.

Feeling sick, she went to the bathroom and lifted her robes; in the dim light, the blotches on her thighs and stomach were hard to make out clearly but quite obviously there. She dropped her skirts and felt all over her face; to her relief, the tender soreness that came with the spots was nowhere to be found. Hinata looked down at her hands again and counted, one, two, ten, thirty: the folds of the kimono would conceal her body but her hands wouldn't be so easily hidden. The dwarf would notice as soon as he came with her lunch, notice and tell Kabuto, who would examine her and realize--

"I-I guess...I'll just h-have to think of s-something," she said and wished, not for the first time, that she was Shikamaru.

oooooo

Once outside, she mimed shivering, hands drawn up into her sleeves: she'd already pulled her thin socks up as far as they would go and they covered the gap between her hem and skin nicely. "Why is it so cold in here today?" she wondered aloud (though softly) and put her whole heart into pretending that the temperature had suddenly dropped five degrees. It was an incredibly foolish and simplistic plan, but it was the best she could come up with under such limited conditions: staying in bed and acting sick might bring Kabuto, so she stuck to her usual routine and trained, staying in the deepest shadows, then retreated to her bed to wait for lunch, sitting with her legs drawn up to her chest and her hands tucked behind her knees for "warmth".

_Please, just let him bring the food and leave without noticing anything. There's nothing to notice here. Nothing at all. The wall is more interesting than I am. _The door latch rattled and her heart sped up.

_I'm nothing, nothing, honestly nothing. Please, just do what you have to and go._ Her palms were sweating and she tucked them more firmly under her robes; more sweat ran down her back. She leaned against the wall for camouflage: the cold stone against her spine helped her heart to slow. It's okay. _Everything will be okay. Think of this as just another kind of training. I only need to control myself for a minute. _

The latch clicked open and she held her breath, then slowly let it out. I can do this. She fixed her gaze on her feet, not wanting to compound her unusual behavior by looking at the dwarf directly and heard him step inside, the door shutting immediately behind him: rods tumbled back into place, metal grinding against metal as he shot the bolt home.

Fear nipped at Hinata's heart. Since when did he close and lock the door behind him...? Someone cleared their throat, gently: she looked through her lashes and noticed the shadow on the floor was much taller than it was supposed to be.

_No. Oh, no, no._

"Good morning," Kabuto said in his usual gentle tones and smiled his sweet smile. "It's been a while, hasn't it, Miss Hinata? I'm sorry I haven't been in sooner, but things have been rather busy as of late, and I just couldn't spare the time...is something wrong? You're whiter than usual."

All of her courage had dried up and blown away, leaving her husked and empty, held upright only by the wall at her back.

"Miss Hinata?" He took a step closer. "Are you all right? You look like you're in pain. Or ill."

She fumbled up some words for him, anything to keep him away. "N-no...I-I'm just c-cold, t-thank y-you, b-but shouldn't the d-dwarf be here...m-my f-food...?" Her voice shook, then died out entirely when Kabuto moved even closer to her, frowning.

"Oh, he'll be along in a bit, don't you worry. Now, are you absolutely certain that everything's all right? It doesn't feel cold in here to me at all, and you're so pale--" His hand brushed the hair away from her forehead, then lay against it, checking her temperature: his skin was hot and dry, the calluses on his fingers pulling slightly at her skin. "Though, you're always pale, aren't you? The Hyuuga are just made that way, I suppose."

"Y-yes," she croaked, barely able to think with the weight of his hand on her head. She tried not to look at his eyes, tried not to do or be anything other than small, harmless and normal. Utterly normal. "I'm fine," she said, more strongly this time. "Truly."

"That's a relief," he said and stepped back, but not before smoothing her hair down, patting it into place as if she was a kitten he was petting. "I would hate for everything to be thrown off schedule, especially since I have so little time as it is," Kabuto added, and grimaced slightly. "I really can't afford any delays."

Something about the look on his face made her afraid to ask but Hinata steeled herself and spoke anyway: information is more important than fear. "S-schedule? Delays?"

He smiled down at her. "To get started on your testing, of course."

oooooo

_Don't look that way. You'll hardly feel a thing._

Hinata lay doubled-up in bed that night, shivering for real, her fingers clenched so tightly on the mattress that her nails bent back._ Surely you didn't think that you were being kept simply here for ransom? No, you're smarter than that: I always thought so. Lord Orochimaru needs the secrets of the Byakugan, after all, and you're the only specimen we have at the moment. It won't really hurt, I promise you. _

She was being boiled alive with fear, tears and sweat threatening to drown her. Her thoughts wouldn't line up correctly: they bounced and drifted and spun so she couldn't get a good grip on them.

She was going to die.

_I'll see you in a few days. We have a lot to discuss before I can start the preliminary testing._

_You won't be awake for most of it. You won't feel a thing._

_I promise you._

Hinata wished for someplace warm and dark and quiet where she could scream.

oooooo

When she couldn't eat the next day, the dwarf laughed at her, then pulled out a filthy pad of paper and a pen and wrote: _he'll be angry if you dont eat, you cant waste away here, so dont even try it,_ and waved it in her face for emphasis.

Hinata ate.

oooooo

She watched the sunset and tried to stamp the way the light thickened and dimmed from gold to orange to red into her mind, turning her hands over and over in her lap. Much light, little warmth. The red spots on her hands had almost entirely faded but in the light they were briefly rekindled, and Hinata looked down at them, thinking of blood and fire and chakra.

_Chakra brings blood, but blood can't bring chakra. I can't undo what was done to me. _

_I am weak and probably going to die. _

_...Why can't I be strong enough, just this once? _

The light on her hands was silvery now and Hinata looked up at the moon, feeling a brief pang of wonder. It's so beautiful, even here.

_I wish I was on it. _

Her palms itched and she scratched them idly: there was a slight flurry of pain when she went over the spots. _I feel so odd now, so calm. Am I already moving away from myself? I guess this is what happens when everything drains out of you and you're left with just the framework of yourself. Right now, I'm not even scared._

_I can't just give up. But I don't know what more I can do._ Her palms itched again, more strongly this time and she scratched harder in response. _My tenketsu won't open, despite all my work. And my hands just won't stop itching..._

There was something wet under her nails. She lifted her hands, held them flat to the light: drops fell, flashing silver, to dot her thighs and soak through the thin fabric of her robe, leaving warm patches against her skin. Blood, spangled crimson and silver, snaking through the lines of her palms.

Hinata stared at her bloody hands and her palms throbbed gently in response, the pain so mild she could scarcely feel it. Now that she was paying attention she could see long furrows tracking back and forth along her palms, gouges left by her nails in her skin. _I...what is this? Why doesn't it hurt? I cut myself over and over and hardly feel a thing. _

_Shouldn't I feel **something?** _

A flicker and sputter beneath her breastbone: she thought it might her heart, waking up.

_I thought everything was just from fear, but..._

_Did he...put something in my food to make feel this way? To keep me subdued? _

Hammers pounded: it took her a minute to realize that the thudding belonged to her heart and she put a hand over it for quiet. Kabuto might hear.

_His doped and obedient lamb to the slaughter. No._

_No._

_Why does everyone assume that I'll die so quietly? That...that they can just put their hand and crush me into nothing? _

_No. _

She looked at her palms, gleaming silver with the moonlight. Her tenketsu under all this blood, tiny portals for her light. If Hinata squinted, she could see it glittering just below the skin.

"I need you," she said aloud and wiped her hands on her robe: Kabuto would probably give her a new one anyway, just to keep up appearances. "I need your strength. Please, for me." Her hand remained dark.

"For me," she whispered. There was a string of tenketsu across her hand like small full moons: she thought of them and concentrated until her sight went, sweat pouring down her body and her muscles twitched and ached, as she tried to condense herself down into a web of chakra, a being of pure light.

She dreamed of pounding on stone walls until her hands broke and bled, yet she continued to rake at them with her fingers, shredding them down to the bone. Her right arm was on fire: she swallowed back her screams and let it burn, hoping that the seals would be purged away in the flames. She calmly and carefully pried away the briers someone had trained to grow around her arm, working out the thorns embedded in her flesh. Once the last thorns were out, blue light streamed free but the brier twisted up again to block it and she had to entice the thorns away with her heart, pulling apart her ribcage to show the naked organ inside. The thorns abandoned her arm and clung to her heart gladly, bringing a pain beyond anything Hinata had ever known, but at least her arm was free and light poured out like water from heaven.

When she woke, a new robe lay across the foot of the bed and someone had cleaned the blood from her hands.

oooooo

Hinata spent the next day laying quietly, careful to keep her secret. She pretended to be sick with terror and kept mostly to her bed, eating little and testing her tenketsu under the cover of sheets. Only the ones on her right arm were open, but few had opened all the way. It was better than nothing: she had a weapon now, even if it was a dull and rusty one. The only thing left was to chose her time.

_Soon_, she thought as she drifted out to sleep that night. _It will have to be soon. I don't know when he'll come for me._

_...Tomorrow then, before Kabuto comes. And before I lose my nerve._

She rose at her usual time and trained again, putting on a brave show for anyone who might be watching. _Everyone knows Hinata Hyuuga doesn't give up_, she thought as she went through the traditional Hyuuga warm-up exercises. _I don't give up and I don't run away. _

Her right arm prickled but she didn't look at it, concentrating on her footwork instead. _Today I'm going to modify that a little._ She washed up after her training was done, then sat down to wait for the dwarf and lunch.

When the door rattled, Hinata stood up slowly and walked to stand on the other side of the door, feeling lightheaded and short of breath. If Kabuto was out there again...but the door opened and the familiar squat figure walked through with the tray, stopping short once he realised she wasn't in her usual place.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I really am."

The dwarf wasn't a shinobi and she was far stronger than him, despite her lack of chakra and imprisonment. It was easy: grab the short arms with her left, hit the tenketsu point in the neck that disrupted the blood flow to the brain with the chakra with her right. Another push and he fell, cracked his head against the table and lay still.

"I'm sorry," Hinata said again, pushing away a brief flutter of guilt: blood dribbled down his cheek as she knelt beside him, ready for any sudden movement. With shaking hands she carefully pushed aside the reeking folds of his coat and felt for the metal ring. Once found, it took several hard tugs before the ring came free of the cloth, the keys jangling in her hand like temple bells and she was so frightened her heart was preparing to stop.

She looked at the dwarf once more before leaving: there was a small pool of blood forming by his left ear and she wondered how long it would take him to wake and if he would be punished for allowing her to escape. If she did escape. If she wasn't caught and killed on the spot by the masses of Sound troops she was almost certain waited for her outside the door. _Move, move, move_, she chanted inwardly and stepped forward with her eyes closed.

When she opened them a heartbeat later, there was a wall in front of her and perfect silence, aside from the pulse pounding in her ears. She stepped forward again: there was a hallway to her right, empty. Another step took her into the hallway where she wavered for a moment: right or left? Right disappeared into darkness; left grew brighter as it went along. Left then, she decided, and went, the keys clenched in her fist to muffle any noise.

The tile floor was cold and gritty underneath her socks and she moved in a kind of half-shuffle, half-crouch, ready to turn and flee to the shadows at the slightest movement or noise around her. It was too dark and too quiet, though Hinata could hardly hear anything past the beat of the blood in her ears and the faint skittering rustle of her feet on the ground (it was her feet she was hearing, wasn't it?). She needed shoes, though she'd walk barefoot to Konoha in fifteen foot snowdrifts if she had to. Her robe was thin and worn: she needed a coat too. Fire Country never grew as cold as, say, Rock in the winter, but temperatures did sometimes dip below freezing at nights. It would be very funny if she escaped only to freeze to death a few miles away from home. She bit her lip hard to hold back the laughter. Very funny indeed!

_How like her_, the elders would say, their faces a fretwork of wrinkles as they sipped their tea and glanced sideways at each other. _How very like her, to die so stupidly. Though, to be honest, we never really expected anything else. _

Pebbles rolled under her feet as she neared a bend in the corridor and her steps slowed automatically. As quietly as she could, she moved to the wall and pressed herself against it, feeling damp rock through her robes: her fingers found moss and mold. I hear nothing. Trickles of dirty water from above ran down her cheek and dripped off her chin, soaking into her collar. _Is it raining outside? Are we...could we be underwater?_

_Fear, sweat and dirty water: I must smell like a swamp under all this stone. If any of the Sound nin have a nose like Kiba-kun's, I'm in deep trouble._

Despite the silence she hemmed, curling her fingers at the very edge of the bend, uncertain about going further. Quiet meant nothing: it was both shield and weapon to the skilled shinobi and traps made no noise until they were sprung. However, the longer she waited, the greater the chance of someone coming along and finding her, the more likely the dwarf was waking on her cell floor and running for his master...

She moved, sliding forward until one eye watched rock and one looked down a corridor as dim and empty as the one she'd just come through. The corridor bent again about seventy-five feet down but she could deal with that when she came to it. Relief trembled through her and she took a step out.

"Man, I hate this...come on, there's--"

"I know it sucks, but sheesh, you do nothing but complain...once in a while..."

"Come on--"

Hinata stopped dead. Sound nin, about five hundred feet ahead of her and coming her way, at least two of them, maybe a third: the voices were too indistinct to tell. Hide, run, fight? Drop to her knees and pretend to be a servant, cleaning the corridor? Head back the way she'd came and pray it remained empty? Fight? _Don't be ridiculous, you have maybe five tenketsu open and three men will tear you apart._ Her vision was blurring at the edges, going soft and crackly and dark with fear. _Be strong! Be a shinobi!_ There were doors set here and there in the walls: one, a little ways down, had light underneath. Would the keys open them? _What if someone's inside?_

"Kabuto-sensei--"

_Calmdowncalmdowncalmdowncalmdown._

There were too many keys on the ring and they clanked loudly as her trembling fingers sorted them. Too many, she'd never figure this out before being recaptured and killed. If she only had her Byakugan...but she didn't...

_I need it! I need it! Come to my call! Naruto-kun did it before, he did it when Neji-niisan sealed off all his chakra, he did the impossible..._

She raised her shaking hands to her temples, brushed chakra into the points behind her eyes: the keys hit the floor and slid sideways into the dark. _Chakra! Unseal it! Help me!_ Her vision flickered and she felt the veins on her cheeks begin to lift and stretch. _Do it! _

_Byakugan!_

The world around her changed.

oooooo

It was not a proper Byakugan that she had called, but a smeary, wavering grey version like charcoal drawings left to run in the rain. It was not a proper Byakugan, but it was enough: it showed her three Sound nin flickering closer, the dropped keys to her right and an unlocked door that led to a room with a window inside it. Daylight streamed in to patch warm squares on the floor and there were even cabinets that held supplies. She bent and grabbed the keys with a muttered sob (her weak Byakugan was giving her a fierce headache, one that felt like tigers eating at her brain) and fled to the room, retaining just enough composure to softly shut the door and turn the bolts behind her.

oooooo

_Deep breaths, deep breaths._

The Sound nin had walked past without a glimmer of suspicion, their voices rising and falling in a natural rhythm. Kabuto had not been among them, and Hinata was split between relief and anguish: he could pop up anywhere, at any time, then. For now, she released her bloodline limit, knelt on the floor and breathed through the pain her imperfect Byakugan had brought, forehead resting on the pillar of her knees.

She couldn't spare time for this. As her head continued to pound (the pain, she noted uneasily, was situated right in the center of her forehead, exactly where the Curse Seal was placed) she rose and went to the window, squinting up at it through the light. The sunlight that had seemed so welcoming in the dark hallway was actually thin, grey-white and watery-looking in a way that promised snow. Light was light, she reminded herself, and would help her find her way but it would also make it harder for her to move unseen.

That was the first troublesome thing. The second was that this window had no bars or grills to prevent outside access; the only security measure was a small, simple-looking bolt that didn't even require a key. Standing on tiptoes, she peered out cautiously: the vague shadowy scenery she had glimpsed with her Byakugan revealed itself as the slope of a hill, thickset trees standing leafless, scrub bushes to the right and left. No Sound guards in sight, no defense systems, not even a gate. Just land stretching on until her sight gave out, empty of threat.

Hinata turned away and went to the cabinets, shivering a little. Three things in her favor: the unlocked door, the unbarred window, the lack of patrols and barriers. _I am not this lucky._ Someone had left a old happi coat among the neatly folded linens stacked inside the first cabinet she came to: it was thin, but she needed every extra layer she could find against the cold. She shook it out and put it on, checking first for anything that might have been left inside, like a stray pin or needle. Nothing: she tied it closed.

_If there is anything here for my feet, I will really start to panic_, she told herself as she checked the other cabinets for potential supplies: weapons were too much to hope for. _For this is all too, too convenient. _

"Even so, I have to try," she whispered and saw her breath wisp into the air before her. "But...you know that, don't you?"

The bolt came undone at the first try, with an ease that suggested recent oiling. She put her hands out the window first, then slowly eased her head out as well, each breath an agony to her parched mouth and throat, and miserably certain that a kunai would smash into the side of her skull at any moment. She breathed, and nothing. Her feet pushed at the wall, boosting her forward and her shoulders and torso slipped out to the fresh air: nothing. She gripped the ground, digging rocks and dirt into her palm and pulled forward: a twist of her hips and she was free for the moment.

Nothing moved, even as she stared blindly against the sky.

Trembling, she turned and carefully pulled the window closed, then scurried up the forest slope on her hands and knees, leaving Otogakure behind her.

oooooo

For a long while she simply ran, trying to put as much distance between herself and Sound as she possibly could, having resolved to stop and get her bearings once she was a safe distance away. Leaving at a run wasn't the choice a shinobi would normally make when escaping--she was certain that there was a long, plainly marked trail of passage winding behind her--but true stealth was impossible without chakra and she needed to hold on to the tiny bit she had access to. The wind snapped at her hair, bitterly cold and Hinata started running with one hand over her mouth and nose, trying to keep some warmth for herself. _It's so cold! Fire Country doesn't usually get like this. I wonder if it's just because I'm not suitably dressed? _

Trees went by in a blur and the only sounds in the forest seemed to come from her, small under the trees: the hiss of her breathing, the stamp of her feet on the cold hard ground. Birds weren't calling. She heard water in the distance once, but kept to her path.

Everything ached: her feet, her lungs, her blue-tinged hands but she ignored them all and pressed on. She could worry about frostbite and shelter once she covered a long enough distance, though she couldn't even dream of calling herself safe until she was back home in the Hyuuga compound. _How far?_ she wondered, but a stabbing pain bit suddenly into her side and she faltered. _Just a stitch, nothing __to worry about_, she chided herself but her feet had other plans and she slowed to a walk, panting and a little shaky. _Maybe I should slow down just a little bit though and check myself. I can't keep running if I exhaust myself at the first go and I'm hardly in the best physical condition. Plus, I won't know what direction I need to go to get home until I figure out where I am. _

She turned and took another look down the way she had just come: by her best reckoning, an hour (or even more) had passed since she'd left Sound. Surely someone had found the dwarf by now: surely someone had realized she had escaped and was getting a pursuit together. Her chest continued to ache. She wasn't this lucky (though Kabuto had taken his own sweet time coming to see her and implied that his "testing" wouldn't start for another few days...perhaps the dwarf really was a fairly unimportant servant whose absence might go unremarked for days at a stretch...and she really had to stop thinking like this: it would do her no good at all, being positive).

A bird called sharply, the first she'd heard all day; she lifted her head and scanned the branches above for it, saw nothing. Now that she had stopped, new pain started to creep up on her, no longer dulled by the distraction of escaping: her legs ached as if she'd been beaten and her feet felt like they been stripped to the bone. Hinata leaned against a tree for support, lifted one foot and saw blood and dirt: the sole of her sock was completely worn through. She put it down again and swallowed. _I'll just have to make do_, she thought and began to tear strips off her robe to bind up her feet.

Something thumped quietly next to her ear and strands of her hair drifted down to lie at her feet. Hinata turned her head very slightly, touched her cheek to metal still warm from someone's body and looked up.

Kabuto was perched on a branch above her, another kunai ready to go in his hand.

The kunai flashed past her but Hinata was already gone, running through the trees on her bleeding feet, pushing branches away with frozen fingers. The land dipped slightly: she stumbled down onto a new path but kept moving. Unable to help herself, she risked a glance behind her and nearly collapsed with shock: Kabuto was keeping pace with her, close enough to stick her with a dozen kunai, close enough to reach out and touch...and he did. He stretched out an arm and laid his fingers lightly on her sleeve: Hinata sobbed before she could help herself, jerked her arm away and somehow managed to run even faster.

_I don't care. I'll run until I drop dead if that's what it takes! I won't give in to him. I won't!_

The ground was growing soft and slippery: mud pulled at her legs but felt strangely good on her tortured feet. She kept running as best she could, arms out for balance and the path began to widen, the trees thinning and the light growing stronger. Another kunai whisked past her ear: more strands of hair fell and her cheek stung. _I won't._

A piece of her right sleeve fluttered away with the wind.

_I won't._

The land sloped downward. Hinata picked up speed, trying to ignore the way her chest burned. _If I can just keep a path...If I can just..._ There was a cluster of trees ahead, tilting into the path and narrowing it sharply but it looked like there was space enough for her to slip between them, which might slow him down...

"Watch out," Kabuto called sweetly, suddenly, and Hinata stumbled and fell into the light as the path dropped out from beneath her.

Pain bolted through her; hands and feet, hips and knees. For a moment, she couldn't move, even with Kabuto so close behind. The path she had been counting on had led her into ruin, a dead-end in the form of a dried-out lake that looked to stretch for a mile, with sides too steep to climb.

"We drained this a little while back, with the intention of putting a satellite base here," Kabuto said from above her. "Our current base is a bit cramped, if you hadn't noticed. Not nearly enough space to conduct proper research. Storage is really a problem..."

_There shouldn't be a lake of this size here. I know Fire Country. All of our large lakes have villages right by them. The scenery doesn't match either. This isn't right. I...don't know where I am now. _

"Are you ready to give up?" His voice was quiet and level.

Hinata pulled herself up, trying to wipe the sweat and tears out of her eyes with a mud-smeared fist. Keeping her back straight she waded on, walking further into the mud until it came past her ankles, then stopped and looked around. No village, not even the ruins of one. She turned to look back at the path (_dry streambed_, her mind corrected) and saw that Kabuto had jumped down through the trees and come forward a little to meet her. They faced each other, a thousand feet apart.

A smile tugged at his mouth but quickly went away: he was trying to look serious. "Satisfied? You're not at home anymore."

Her lips were chapped and her face was bleeding, making it very difficult to talk. "Y-You're lying."

He spread his arms wide, half-turning to sweep in the scenery around them with a wave of his hands. "Didn't you notice, didn't you think that things didn't seem quite familiar? You didn't see that the trees were all strangers and everything was out of place? Honestly, I expected much more from a member of Leaf's premier tracking team. We left the Fire Country a long time ago, Miss Hinata. While you were sleeping, we left."

"I-I don't believe you." _You're a liar, everyone knows that. You lie with your eyes, you lie with your mouth, every bit of you lies. "_You're trying to trick me..."

His face was full of an annoyance softened only slightly by pity. "From here to the Fire Country, it's three weeks hard walking and your feet are bare to the stones." He took another step closer, then another while she tensed. "No chakra, no supplies, no warm clothing...You'll never make it, not as you are."

She stepped back, the mud sucking at her heels and shifted her weight in preparation. For an instant, she wondered which of them would be the first to strike. "I-I'll m-manage somehow. I'll n-never go back with you."

Kabuto sighed and adjusted his glasses, the lens briefly catching the weak light, then releasing it to show his eyes again, grave and dark. "Please, enough. Your "do or die" act was cute the first time, but now...Stop being ridiculous and come back quietly, and I'll--"

"N-no! No! You're the...you're the one who's being ridiculous if you think I'm j-just going to l-let you take me back t-there!" By the end she was shouting, her fists clenched and her body a little shivery with the shock of being so loud. _I've never yelled like this at anyone before. _"I won't go with you! I'll never willingly go with someone like you!"

The wind rose. Her shout went with it, swaddled in a crush of air, but Hinata could see by the change in Kabuto's face that he'd heard ever word she'd said. "Fine," he said evenly. "On your head be it." His hand lifted, adjusting his glasses once more and he looked at her through his fingers with an expression that pretended to be regret.

Hinata dropped into Juuken stance and watched his hands move through seals so quickly she could scarcely see them, all the while hoping very hard that he wouldn't be able to tell that her tenketsu were open on her right arm. If she was lucky, if she could get one good hit in...

"This won't take long," he said, and sprang at her.


	9. The Ending You Deserve

**Note:** It's done. It's finally done and all I can say is that I'm sorry for the long wait and hope that the chapter is worth all the time it took.

Bumping the rating to R for this chapter because of the violence, because if you didn't already know it, KABUTO IS AN ASSHOLE.

That being said, I will try my damnedest not to take another year to update this fic.

Next up: porn! Probably.

000000

**Muma VIII: The Ending You Deserve**

_In your final moments, o one-winged bird,_

_Whose name did you call out?_

It was sheer luck that she avoided Kabuto's lunge. Her foot slid a little too far as she moved into a defensive position and she stumbled, almost falling to her knees before she righted herself and moved away again. Kabuto overshot her, but recovered more quickly than she expected, and came at her again.

"I'm afraid I have the advantage here," he said conversationally as Hinata jerked back to avoid his swipe. "I'm healthy, rested, and fully clothed...and I have chakra to keep me from sinking into the mud as you are. Why are you fighting, again? You really don't have a chance."

She didn't want to talk to him: she needed to keep all her breath and concentration for what little she could do in battle. Even as she was clumsily dodging his blows, she used every moment she could grab to scan the land around them, searching for a way out. Nothing looked promising.

_He's playing with me_, she thought as she just barely managed to avoid another of his chakra scalpels. _Just like that time with Ne...he could end this in a second if he wanted to. But he wants to play, so maybe I really can....if I can just get one chance.... _

" 'Never say die' is a cute philosophy, but it didn't save you the last time. I did."

She shook her head and dodged. She retreated and he advanced, never letting her gain a significant distance for more than a few seconds. Her hopes of outrunning him, slim to begin with, had faded completely.

"_I_ saved you. For all your bravery and will, you couldn't do it yourself. What's the use of putting everything on the line in a hopeless fight if you still fall to the ground in a bloody mess as a loser? More sport for those watching, I suppose. Is that what you want? To make nothing more than a spectacle of yourself? Part of being an adult is facing up to reality gracefully."

Kabuto was suddenly much closer: he grinned, tapped her left shoulder lightly and it went numb all the way down to her fingertips. Hinata gasped, partly from fear and partly out of relief that it hadn't been her right. He was still next to her, smirking and she took a chance, pushed her numb shoulder against his chest and shoved _hard_. Kabuto's smirk vanished as he actually stumbled and went down, his chest unguarded.

_Now!_

She darted at him, hand ready, but once again, Kabuto recovered too quickly: he was already halfway up and met her attack with a kick at her belly, pushing her away. Hinata retreated, panting through her teeth: his kick had been off but it still hurt enough that she wanted to double over. Kabuto, strangely, stayed where he was, then wiped mud off his face and looked at her, unsmiling.

_Oh, no...does he realize now that I have some tenketsu open? I ran at him instead of away..._

"Still going? Let me give you some advice, Miss Hinata. You're not Naruto-kun."

He raised his hand and reignited his chakra scalpel, watching her over its gas blue blade.

"Miracles," he continued, in a pleasant, even tone, "only work for those stupid enough to believe in them. Only someone as utterly stupid as Naruto-kun can shear the laws of reality by dumb, persistent will. He doesn't have enough brain cells to realize the impossible. But, you and I? Miracles will never succeed for us because we know all too well how the world works. We can't suspend our minds long enough to accept the impossible and deny reality long enough to gain miracles. You went into the fight knowing it was hopeless, didn't you? Somewhere in the back of your mind, a little voice said "I'll never win this. I'm weak and he's strong." We always know the truth, Miss Hinata. We can't escape it. No miracle is coming for you here. Accept that now and I'll be easy with you. Not as easy as I would have been had you done the sensible thing from the start. But...easier."

"I w-won't."

"As expected," he said, and shrugged.

This time he was faster, giving her almost no room to evade him. _He's getting bored, he wants to end this, she realized, the edges of her hard-won calm starting to crack a little with panic. I don't have many chances left...I can't get him while he's attacking like this-- _

And then she remembered.

Kabuto was very close now, chakra scalpel aimed low. "I'll cut the muscles in your legs and then you'll have no choice but to give this farce up. Can you walk on severed muscle through sheer will alone? I don't think you can."

His smirk was truly disgusting in its confidence.

_Almost there..._

She waited quietly: things seemed very slow. She saw his arm start to move in attack, saw the small wrinkle between his eyes when he realised she wasn't trying to dodge him or run away, felt the tip of his scalpel penetrate her thigh, then quite calmly grabbed his right arm, closed her fingers around his wrist and shoved all her chakra into his arm.

Blood sprinkled her face.

Kabuto didn't scream like Togito: he was too self possessed for that. He reeled away, nearly fell, then righted himself with obvious effort and turned back towards her, clutching his arm. Blood was streaming down it in great rivers, dripping down to the earth below: so she hadn't been able to blow it off the way she had before. From the look of it, he was trying to heal himself, but her attack should have closed all the tenketsu in his arm, making it impossible to bring chakra there. Kabuto looked at his arm, then looked up at her, and Hinata noticed, with a twinge of fear, that the whites of his eyes had gone a bloody red.

_Huh? That shouldn't have affected his eyes..._

"Oh, we're just full of secrets, aren't we, Miss Hinata," he spat, all pretense at civility gone. "Taking a page out of Naruto-kun's playbook. More fool me--more fool you. This little attack won't save you--"

She ran at him.

He stopped healing and raised his left hand, blue light springing up around it once more. "Did you think I can't do this with both?" he yelled and Hinata strained for more chakra, for everything she had left...

Something stabbed through her right foot: it twisted under her, sending her sprawling and she fell face-first into the mud, eyes wet with pain.

_Not Kabuto! He's still over there! What--_

She struggled to get up but she simply wasn't fast enough and Kabuto wasted no time. He was on her before she could even rise to her knees, grabbed at her hair with his good arm, yanked her upper body back, and kicked her hard in the ribs.

Bone split and she spit up blood, dazed with agony. He released her, but not before using his chakra scalpel to cut off the nerves in her right arm and she fell hard into the mud, bruising her forehead on a stone.

"No more speeches? No more 'I'll never give up?'" He kicked her again, then used his foot to throw her onto her back. "Have we learned our lesson yet? It was a nice try, but as I said before, you're _not_ Naruto-kun. You're a weakling and a fool and you're supposed to be smarter than this."

The sky was wheeling grey and black above her and breathing hurt so much she wanted to stop. Kabuto was bending over her but she couldn't move; she couldn't even keep her eyes focused in one place.

Kabuto cocked his side to one side. "I think you're done."

Blood bubbled on her lips.

Hands grasped her, pulled her up, twisted an arm behind her back to hold her. "Let's go. It's over. It's done."

000000

Kabuto made her walk back, or tried to: she couldn't breathe properly or walk in a straight line, so he healed her a bit and pushed Hinata on. "A sop that you don't deserve, but your lesson won't be learned in full if you pass out on me," he said and snickered. His right arm was apparently good as new, as he seemed to have no trouble using it now. She had accomplished exactly nothing.

Clouds of red filled her vision and Hinata followed them absently as they passed back and forth in front of her eyes. Each time she stumbled Kabuto pressed a little harder on her arm, so she tried her best to walk normally, which was difficult. At times the clouds left, her body left and everything went black; she came around enough once to realize that Kabuto was carrying her. Once the clouds returned, she was set back on her feet and made to walk again. Eventually, they reached the base.

They went from dark to darker, from trees to stone. "In here," Kabuto said after a time, and guided her through a door. She was aware of brighter light and white tile that almost felt good under her feet after the forest floor. He took her to the end of the room and laid her down on cool linens and for that, Hinata was, for a moment, grateful. Then he placed a hand on her chest and filled her lungs with fire.

Bone snapped together and she was breathless and sobbing when he finished a few moments later, too full of pain and fear to keep it hidden decently inside. Kabuto looked down at her, face clear of expression, as a true shinobi's was supposed to be.

"Now that you're capable of breathing and movement again, we're going to take a walk." Pulling her arm up behind her back again, he marched her out the door and down a short hallway, then through another door. The next hallway was barely lit and freezing cold under her torn, bare feet but Kabuto drove her on until they reached a door set with iron bars thicker than her leg.

The door opened and a man peered out at them, then stood aside immediately once he saw who it was. Kabuto nudged her forward--"Be careful, there's a step here"-- and she came down on a dirt corridor that seemed to stretch for miles.

Kabuto walked her a bit more, then stopped. Torches flickered around them, but there didn't seem to be anything much to see and they stood quietly in the semi-darkness for a few minutes, until someone coughed.

Startled, Hinata looked in the direction of the sound: it seemed to come from one of the sacks lying piled around them in great humps. She squinted, leaning forward: Kabuto called sharply and a Sound-nin appeared from the far end of the room, carrying a torch to them.

"Take a look," Kabuto said into her ear and the Sound-nin swung the torch towards the sacks.

The first thing she saw were black bars set vertically, and then the curve of someone's jaw, blotchy with dirt. The torch moved higher and picked out hair, hands, feet, chains: the sacks were prisoners hunched together in tiny cells and fear set all its hooks into Hinata's body.

"The useless ones," Kabuto said. "The ones too old, too infirm or simply not suitable for whatever reason to either join us or become part of Lord Orochimaru's research. They will lie here in the darkness, wasting away, until they die, because he has decreed so: once you come inside Otogakure, you can never leave again." He turned his head as he finished, apparently looking for something.

She was shaking so much she was surprised he could still keep hold of her. "W-why..d-did y-you...?"

"To show you the consequences of stupidity," he said, quite calmly, and gestured at a prisoner seated in the far corner of the holding cell: an old man if his grey hair and hollow cheeks were any indication. The Sound-nin holding the torch stepped forward.

"Kill him."

"NO!"

Hinata howled, pulled and somehow twisted away, landing heavily on the floor. Spikes of pain dug into her chest and she suddenly couldn't catch her breath, but she begged all the same. "Pleasedon'tpleasedon'tdon'tpunishhimbecauseofmeplease," she whispered and coughed so hard it felt like another rib broke.

"Well, if you're going to be like that about it..." and Hinata managed to turn her head enough to see the Sound nin walking back towards them, looking a little peeved.

"Heh. Heh." Laughter rustled like mice through paper and to Hinata's shock, the old man unbent himself and crawled out of his corner, pressing his face against the bars. "I appreciate the thought, young lady, but--hehe--it would have been kinder if you had let them kill me. Now I'll spend more days in the dark."

"Don't push it, old man," Kabuto snapped, then knelt and bent over her tormented body. "Breaking the ribs I just healed, again."

Hinata tried not to cry as his hands pulled and tugged, separating tissue and bone, forcing things back into their proper configuration again. The prisoners had gone back to being silent, lifeless lumps strewn around the cells: the only breathing Hinata could hear was her own pain-filled gasps. "The next time you pull a stunt like this, I'll have you kill one with your own hands," he said and Hinata was beginning to wish that she could just will herself dead.

Kabuto finished and sat back on his heels, watching her, his mouth in a thin, tight line.

"Listen to me, please. Do you see now that I'm not fooling around? You are of virtually no interest to Lord Orochimaru. You are weak; he doesn't care about the Hyuuga as he does the Uchiha; you are at best a mild curiosity to him, and only because he wonders why I really want to keep you. Apparently the fact that you're an unsealed Byakugan user and such things are as rare as white elephants isn't good enough." He smiled briefly, but his eyes were cold. "In short: your life depends on you not becoming a liability and if you continue to do things like run away and make a fuss, he will kill you (or more likely order me to do it) as painfully as possible. Do you understand? I have very little leeway here, and you, none."

She focused on the white sliver of throat between his jaw and high collar and thought about cutting it.

"Do you understand?"

"I-y-yes. I understand y-you. A-and I w-wish you had left me to die," she said, and held her breath. She could feel, somehow, that the prisoners were watching her.

Kabuto's expression skipped between anger and amusement for a moment; then he took hold of her wrist and pulled Hinata to her feet. "Heh. Be a little more specific, Miss Hyuuga: I've saved you twice, you know. And besides," he said from over his shoulder as he led her out and the guards locked the door behind them, "what's done is done. All's fair in war, after all...I can't take any of it back."

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Hinata was alert enough this time to see the line of bloody footprints leading from the corridor onto the tile as they re-entered the medical room. Her feet still hurt dreadfully and each step she took had a slight pull as her torn flesh tried to stick to the smooth floor. Kabuto led her back to the bed and told her to sit, but not before he swept the bloody sheets off, then produced a pair of shackles and chained one of her arms to the bedpost.

"I've had quite enough of you running off today," he said as he disappeared into a nearby doorway. Hinata heard running water.

Her teeth chattered: she clamped them together but that just sent the shiver down into her neck and shoulders. Her arms and legs wouldn't stop shaking, even though she was doing her best to control herself. _What now? What now? What now?_

Kabuto returned, pushing a small cart with a large basin of water, some cloths and several instruments all sharp and shiny. He smiled at her, then dipped a cloth in the water, knelt before her, and began to wipe the mud off her face. The water was warm.

Hinata sat very still.

"I can't stand untidiness," he said as he washed her. "Close your eyes, please... that's better." He dropped the now filthy cloth on the cart, then reached for another, and one of his instruments. "Now, let's see about those feet."

"Why bother? You should just cut them off," a voice said from the doorway, and laughed, low and strong.

Something snapped inside Hinata and for a moment it was as if Kabuto had never healed her and she was still struggling to draw breath through bone shards and blood. She was so very tired and hurt and frightened already, just from Kabuto and now terror beyond anything Kabuto had brought to her was splitting her heart in two as she watched Orochimaru glide into the room, smiling at her.

_I can't...I just can't...I have nothing more in me...Please, no more..._

Kabuto turned halfway and Hinata could see his expression, tolerant and amused. "It would be a fitting punishment, wouldn't it? But I have other things in mind. And, well, she simply won't be very useful without feet."

Orochimaru flickered a hand, a faint look of contempt coming into his eyes. "Hmph. Useful...I thought you were going to experiment on her for her bloodline limit? She certainly doesn't require feet for that."

"She doesn't," Kabuto acknowledged as he reached for another instrument and began to pull at something in her right foot that made Hinata nearly bite through her lip with pain. "But I hate to give up any advantages at the onset...At least grant me a trial run. I'm short staffed. And she could be so very helpful to me."

Hinata bent her head and tried to make it look as though she was staring at nothing as Orochimaru looked her over, clearly comparing her mudstained, bloodstained shambles of a self with his purple silk kimono and long, smooth hair. She was very good at watching things out of the corners of her eyes while pretending her attention was really on something else: all those years spent cowed amongst her family had really turned out to be surprisingly useful in some ways..."If you want to play with the filthy little louse so very badly, I'll let you have her. Though, I can't believe that you still want this...this..._insect_ even after she caused such a disgusting fuss. Really, my dear, you should have done the appropriate thing and killed her on the spot."

Kabuto said nothing, but he smiled up at Orochimaru, a soft, pleased smile that spoke of secrets between them and Hinata felt something hot and wet run down one cheek.

_...I won't live just so they can play with me...Please..._

"Ah, I see now why you went down like that. You stepped on something nasty and it's embedded in your foot," Kabuto murmured suddenly. "Poor Miss Hyuuga...to be undone by a twig." He dropped something twisted and bloody onto the cart, then wiped the bottom of her foot and pressed his hand there. "You'll heal well enough, I think."

"Kabuto," said Orochimaru, "is so very good at keeping his experiments alive. Why, I've even been able to reuse the same experiments again and again...all thanks to him..."

"Yes. Because they're alive," Kabuto said and there was a prickle of something underlining his words that made Hinata forget her fear for a moment and take a second look at his bent head and stiff shoulders. Orochimaru's lips pursed, just slightly.

Kabuto rose and tossed his bloody instrument onto the cart, where it clattered down amongst the rags he had used before to clean her. "Do me the honor of staying here for a moment more, my lord," he said and disappeared back into the other room. Orochimaru's gaze followed him out and there was an expression on his bone-white face that Hinata could not quite name--calculating and disdainful, and even, Hinata thought, maybe a little surprised? No, not surprised. Wary. Orochimaru had looked and not liked what he had seen.

Kabuto returned with a small smile on his face and a glass of amber fluid in his hands. "For you," he said, and placed it in her unchained hand.

"W-what is it...?" Hinata whispered after a moment. There were tiny swirls of something moving in the liquid and even though she knew that there was no choice not to drink, she just couldn't bring the cup to her lips.

"Oh, something to take the pain away," Kabuto said airily and exchanged another knowing smile with Orochimaru.

Her hand wouldn't move...

"What are you waiting for? Drink it," Kabuto said, his smile gone and his tone starting to shade into annoyance. He leaned forward, frowning, and she cringed back before she could stop herself.

"Do," Orochimaru added, giving her a wide snake's smile.

The cup was so heavy in her hand that she had trouble raising it, but it did, bumping against her closed lips. She shut her eyes and tried to fix the faces of her dearest people before her--_Naruto-kun, Hanabi-chan, Neji-niisan, Kiba-kun and Akamaru, Shino-kun, Kurenai-sensei_--so she would at least have pleasant things surrounding her if she died, and drank.

The liquid was oily and coated her tongue, but the taste was not unpleasant: she finished it and dropped the empty glass on the bed.

Several minutes passed, in silence and nothing happened, as far as Hinata could tell. Her heart still beat, she could still breathe, her mind remained unclouded...

Hinata opened one eye enough to see Kabuto looking puzzled and somewhat exasperated, while Orochimaru's face bore an expression of polite incredulity. "Kabuto, my dear boy," he murmured, "wasn't she--"

"She was," Kabuto said, no longer bothering to hide his annoyance. "How could she--well, never mind. It's interesting, though. Very interesting. I'll have to do a little further testing on her later." His voice faded towards the end of his sentence, as if he was walking away, so Hinata opened both eyes, but kept them directed at her lap.

Footsteps approached, then stopped in front of her. A hand grasped her free arm, there was a quick burst of pain and Hinata looked up to see Kabuto smiling at her over the hypodermic syringe now in her shoulder. "Lights out," he said, and pressed the plunger.

This time she didn't stay awake.

000000

Something rocked her, gently and Hinata came awake, blinking at netting and dark wood. Water slapped the wall beside her and set her to rocking once again. Her ribs felt like knives under her skin, her head heavy and tender and sore.

"Where...am I..." The words seemed to fly from her mouth on splintery wings, her throat still raw from screaming. "This...isn't...my...room..?"

There was a rustle nearby, a dry cough, the sound of a foot moving on the floor. She turned her head, slowly: beside her, Kabuto turned a page in his book and looked down at her with indifferent eyes.

"A boat," he said, as if it was perfectly natural for them to be adrift together, then bent his head again to his reading. Another wave rolled into them, setting the lantern above Kabuto's head to bobbing: he reached up and stopped it with one hand and a look of annoyance. The light was only a soft, pale blossom of fire, yet it still hurt her eyes.

"Go back to sleep," he told her, hand still clutching the lantern. A finger on his free hand turned down the corner of the page in his book, marking his place: he closed it and set it aside, then took the light away. "Sleep." He was preparing to go.

I'm...not tired is what she wanted to say, but the words fluttered in her throat and went no higher.

"While you can," Kabuto added, then disappeared into the dark.

000000

It was the cold that woke her next and Hinata came awake to find herself squatting knees-to-chest on a broken concrete floor no larger than her wardrobe at home. Light filtered in from an arrowslit window high above her and puddled around her feet, picking out the bruises, blood and scratches on her legs in high relief. Hinata could see patches of skin on her upper thighs where the fabric gaped, very white against the dirt.

Her robe had not been changed: it was the same one, filthy and bloodstained, that she had worn when she tried to escape. If she stretched out a leg, she could touch the door in front of her: steel thicker than her entire body, with a barred observation window and a slit at the bottom for food. There was a bucket to her left and one to her right, one empty, the other filled maybe a cupful with dusty water. There was mold under her feet and she could not stop shivering.

_And now_, she thought over and over as she rocked to keep warm, _what now?_

_Now it begins..._

She stayed as she was for three days and did not move except to rock and take a mouthful of the water, which left her lips and tongue coated with chalky dust. Voices went past every now and then: occasionally eyes appeared in the observation window and watched. She did not look back and eventually they went away. There was no food for her, not even a crust. Evidently she was going to be starved. Hinata rocked and thought of the prisoners Kabuto had brought her to see, bent against themselves and staring into the darkness through their bars. Next time I'll have you kill one with your own hands. What next time? Her blood was ice and her stomach was empty: soon enough, she'd collapse in on herself.

But if she was meant to suffer and die...why the warm water and the clean white bandages wrapped around her feet?

On the second night, someone draped a scrap of blanket over her as she lay half-dead and dreaming and took the water away. When she woke the next day, her fingers were purple and blue from the cold, so she wrapped the blanket around her hands to try and warm them: the bandages kept her feet from freezing, she thought. It was on this third day that they came for her.

000000

She had dozed off and the sound of her cell door being slammed against the wall woke her with a jolt.

Two men stood in the doorway, both almost as broad as they were tall. Moving as one, they stepped forward and seized her by her bruised arms, pulling her into the air between them. She cried out and wriggled in their grips, too weak to do anything else.

"Where to?" one said and the other replied: "Second lab. Come on, he's waiting."

She watched dirty stone sweep by under her feet as they bore her swiftly away. _He...which he...could it be...I don't want...to see either.... _

The men stopped abruptly at a metal door, Hinata swinging in the air like a hooked fish. One knocked at the door and received a muffled "Come in," in response.

Lights glared and tears streamed from her eyes, grown used to shadows. There was nothing in the room but a bed, stripped to its mattress, another cart glittering with instruments and Kabuto.

He was sitting on the bed, reading a scroll as they entered, but stood up as the men brought her forward. He raised his eyebrows and nodded at the bed, then carefully re-rolled the scroll and placed it somewhere in the bottom of the cart.

They threw her down on the mattress, pressing down hard on her shoulders and arms to keep her in place as Kabuto walked to the cart, looked over his instruments for a moment, then selected a scalpel and turned back to her. Over his shoulder, there was something Hinata had not noticed before: a large cutaway diagram of the human eye.

"No..." she whispered and tried to pull away despite her weakness and the strength of the hands holding her down. _I won't...I won't...!_

"Hold her head," Kabuto said softly and stepped forward, scalpel raised. The bed sagged slightly under his weight: he knelt on top on her, knees on either side of her body and reached out for her eyes.

Dry fingers pulled her eyelids apart, holding them open and she turned her face as far to the side as she could go, pressed her cheek down hard into the mattress. The large hands slapped her, yanked out hanks of hair, but she would not move, she would not, she would not...

Kabuto released her eye with an exasperated _hmm-hmm_, then touched a point near her throat and all her muscles locked and would not answer her.

Hands turned her head again and the scalpel's point touched her eye, very lightly, then pressed down. She could not move to get away but she could scream all she liked, her last act of control and resistance. She screamed to deafen, she screamed to shatter and pierce and slash, she screamed in fury and the noises that sprang from her raw throat were grating, wordless and ugly, and she would not stop.

_Tears and blood down my face..._

"It's over, Miss Hyuuga," Kabuto said and her uncut eye saw full moons in duplicate and a mask of horribly patient annoyance and pity before the scalpel made another cut and she could not see at all for pain.

_A guinea pig? An experiment? Was this...all I was ever meant to be?_

"No! No! Let me go! No! NO!"

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_Hinata stirs and makes a soft whimpering sound and Kabuto wakes from his twilight sleep at her side. A moment's examination reassures him that she is still truly asleep and he presses close once again, rests his cheek against her breasts and lets her heartbeat calm him._

_There is a flutter of motion in the room and Kabuto looks up to see a shadow bending low over the bed, looking down at him._

_"Go. You know what has to be done."_

_The figure vanishes and Kabuto resettles himself. Hinata is completely quiet again, her breathing deep and calm, the breathing of someone safely enfolded in a sleep jutsu, wrapped in sweet dreams. _

_Not much longer, he tells himself, listening to each breath, letting the sound sink down within him. So little left...but this wasn't a failure, it's merely that the situation has changed. I won't be stopped now, I can't--_

Kabuto woke up.

It took him a moment to remember who and where he was, and once he did, he put out a hand and touched the space beside him just to verify that it was truly empty. It was.

He sighed. Moving his stiff body carefully, he rolled over so he could look out his window and watch the last few minutes of the pre-dawn grey through his one good eye.


	10. A Bird in the Hand

AN: Done, now I'm going to crawl back into my hole and write porn for the next six months. Tired, off to bed now. Will answer reviews when I have some more free time. Once again, much love to everyone who's left reviews.

**Muma IX: A Bird in the Hand**

The screaming had been over and done with for thirty minutes by this point, but Dr. Tomohiro Haniwa was still deeply annoyed and not about to hide it.

"How often have I told him, not near the recovery wards?" he snapped to the patient little orderly hovering around him as they completed the afternoon rounds. "I know--I know! the Gods forbid you tell the great Kabuto Yakushi what to do with his own projects but _he_ knows and everyone knows that I've asked him time and time again to make sure his precious work doesn't encroach on my own projects! Screaming fit to wake the dead when my men should be sleeping, how the hell does Lord Orochimaru expect any of them to recover at this rate. Not that he actually gives a damn, none of them do, but I like to think that the hours I spend reconstructing these people aren't going to waste because wonder boy there is too full of himself to show some common courtesy! YAKUSHI!"

No response. The orderly, who had heard it all before, slipped away with a polite murmur of support while Dr. Haniwa was gathering air for another attempt.

This time, he opened the door first. "YAKUSHI!" he bellowed down the hallway and received a muffled and distant "In here, Haniwa-kun," for his efforts. Tomohiro muttered yet another imprecation against Kabuto Yakushi (a new one, asking the gods to please see to it that angry lizards consumed Yakushi's intestines) and set off for Laboratory 2.

Much to his surprise the door to the lab was unlocked and more than that, slightly open. Even opened, the heavy steel door required a good push and he finally made it inside, only to find himself half-blinded from glare, as every examination light in the room had been turned so high it was rather a wonder Yakushi's eyeballs hadn't burned out of their sockets yet. Squinting and cursing, he finally located the younger man, crouched over a desk and scribbling furiously in an over-sized sketchbook, and strode to his side.

"Ah, Haniwa-kun, I'm glad you're here," Yakushi said in his blandest tones, not even granting him the courtesy of a look, so completely focused was he on his drawings. "I hope you don't mind doing me a small favor, because as you can see, I'm really very busy at the moment...I need someone to wash her for me. That's all."

"Her?" he asked and Yakushi gestured abruptly at a screen tucked away in a corner of the room. "There are rags and a basin already prepared by the sink. Be gentle."

A flutter of premonition went through him, but he walked to the screen without hesitation, pushed it aside, then looked and let out a breath he hadn't even realized he'd been holding.

_So, it's true...I don't know why I thought things would turn out any differently_, he thought, looking at the sad little corpse as it lay, limbs flung outward, on the blood-sodden bed. He wasn't a man normally moved by these things, but he'd long had an admiration for the Hyuuga, who always did what needed to be done and damn the consequences, and the girl...well, it had been plain from the beginning that she wouldn't survive long. She was, he remembered, supposed to have been the gentle one.

The body was in remarkable good condition despite all the blood, he noted with some surprise: all her parts seemed to be intact and her eyelids were full under their sticky crust: he hadn't taken away her eyes. _Odd! Damned odd!_

Yakushi's voice, thinned slightly with impatience, rose behind him, snapping his thoughts. "Now, if you please...? She needs to be cleaned and I _have_ to get this down before I forget the finer details."

Haniwa drew in a long breath, then let it out in a snort. "Bathing corpses, what's the point? What the hell is that, anyway?"

"Anatomical images from the dissection: they'll form a good starting point for my research, _if_ I can get them finished before my memories start to lose their clarity. So, do you mind?"

"Why, if it's so damned important, didn't you just remove the eyes?" he snapped, but Yakushi's attention had gone completely back to his pad and pencil and his question went unchallenged.

Sighing a curse, he dipped the rag and began to wash away the crusted blood from Hinata Hyuuga's limp body. Despite Yakushi's admonition, the blood had obviously been dried for a while and could not be removed through careful wiping alone, forcing him to fetch more water so he could try and loosen it by soaking her face. The water ran down her cheeks, rusty streams dripping from her chin onto her breasts. Some of the crust began to loosen and with care, he picked it away. Her arms and hands, he noticed, were seamed with defensive wounds...and were those strips of flesh under her nails?

Yakushi chuckled at the question. "She put up quite a struggle and Mishima will be nursing his injuries for at least a week, if not longer--but if someone as large as him can't control such a little girl, then he deserves what he gets. I'm not healing him and you won't either."

The blood wasn't as thick on her body and he devoted his efforts first there while he waited for more of the blood on her face to soften. Her body mostly done, he went for fresh water and poured it on her head once more, water running into her ears and parted lips.

She coughed.

Haniwa nearly dropped the basin on her head from shock. _What the...? Did I accidentally press some trapped air out of her lungs when I leaned against her just now?_ He stopped and took a good hard look at her: the Hyuuga was motionless. _And yet..._ He bent down until his face hovered right about her mouth. Was he imagining things, or was that the faint movement of air against his cheek?

Wiping water aside, he parted her robe, then pulled out his stethoscope and placed it on her chest; for a moment, nothing, and he grimaced, watching Yakushi out of the corner of his eye. The younger man appeared to be serenely oblivious to the little drama unfolding behind him, his hands never stopping as he plotted out the Hyuuga's inner workings, but he knew Yakushi far too well to be lulled by his inaction.

And then it happened: a beat, almost imperceptible, then another followed slowly, nearly as faint. Dr. Haniwa counted, his lips folded into a thin, flat line, then removed his stethoscope and placed it back in his pocket, his movements slow and exaggerated to the point of pantomime. _That damned cheeky brat..._ "So, _sensei_: when were you going to mention that she's still alive? When I knelt on her chest and broke some ribs while cleaning her?"

"Don't say ridiculous things just to make a point," Yakushi replied in an absent tone. "I thought it would be perfectly obvious that she's still alive...Honestly, Haniwa-kun, I really wonder at you sometimes: did you really think I'd throw away such a precious resource so quickly? Dead, her eyes are set forever. I'd never learn all their secrets that way. Alive, her bloodline limit is ever-changing...it's in that the truth lies.

"No," he continued, "she's like that because I gave her some D-Cell 240 once her resistance was exhausted, to prevent, shall we say, another resurgence of feeling on Miss Hyuuga's part...heh. I never predicted that she would keep fighting me for so long. Her resilience was quite a surprise, to say the least."

He stared hard at Yakushi, but the boy continued to have eyes only for his sketching."You spout off about how obvious it is that she remain alive and then turn around and tell me that you gave her D-Cell 240? Yakushi-_sensei_, are you out of your overly busy mind? D-Cell 240? Torture and vivisection and D-cell 240, it's not surprising, _it's absolutely bloody staggering_ that she's still clinging to life! At the very, very least, she'll be in a coma for weeks."

The younger man shrugged slightly, his fingers flying over the paper as he drew spirals and curves, both sprawling and tiny. "I see that you still don't trust me, Haniwa-kun; it was a very small, very calculated dose. She should be awake in a few days at most, and we can smooth over the rough patches then. Very soon, if things go well, this will all seem like nothing more than an unpleasant dream."

"An unpleasant dream, huh. _If_ she wakes up...and if she does, what makes you so certain she won't try to escape again?" he pointed out, ignoring the younger man's jibe. "Even if she stays put, she's nothing more than your lab rat now: what incentive does she have to live? You'll just make new nightmares for her and I'll be bothered once more with screams."

Yakushi laughed softly, one corner of his mouth hooking up into his trademark thin smile. "Oh, I think she's learned her lesson about running away for now," he said, his hand tracing wide arcs on the paper. "As to the other...she's really quite stubborn, though sweet and agreeable when she's given the right incentives to cooperate. I have a feeling that she'll be very willing once I set my terms down."

Tomohiro grunted. "You have another Konoha nin here? A friend?"

"Unfortunately, no." Yakushi was shading something in heavy, dark lines, his face bent close to the paper. "But she's an intelligent little thing. I think she'll see the wisdom of my offer once it's made."

There was one flaw in Yakushi's brilliant plan: Hinata didn't wake up.

Over a week had passed, and the Hyuuga showed no signs of returning to consciousness. Haniwa, who had spent the better part of the week fighting a restless curiosity, finally gave in one afternoon and slipped away to the girl's room to see how things stood.

He should have known better, as Yakushi was already there ahead of him. When Haniwa arrived, Yakushi had just finished packing away his needles into his case and three new vials of blood stood propped upon the nightstand. Yakushi's movements were slow and his face oddly blank, his eyes on the girl laying still in the bed before him and he neither turned, nor acknowledged Tomohiro as the older man came to stand besides him.

There was nothing to do but make the best of it. "So, it looks like the great Kabuto Yakushi isn't infallible after all. I'd say she's found a way to escape you without running away," Haniwa said, his tone dry and snide.*

Normally, Yakushi responded to all sarcasm from him with his infuriatingly sweet smile and an air of infinite tolerance, but now all Haniwa's words drew was a slow blink, and then, a frown, as if it had taken Yakushi a while to process the situation. "Watch your mouth," he said, very quietly and Haniwa could almost feel the splinters as the ice cracked beneath his feet.

They stood in silence for a while, and watched her. Hinata was small and still, her skin the color of rice paper, but with a troubling purplish undertone, and Yakushi was still frowning, his teeth sunk slightly into his lower lip. "My mistake..." he finally muttered, looking only at Hinata. "Or is this all _her_...Haniwa-kun, you think that this is the result of unconscious but deliberate action on her part?"

He shrugged, not really wanting to commit himself. "As much as I'd like to say it's all your hubris causing this, you did admit she's unusually determined. Like I said before: why wake? What's the point? She'll suffer either way."

Yakushi abruptly turned away and grabbed the blood vials off the nightstand, sliding them into his case. "Hmm. If it is her doing, there are ways to get around that," he said, and his mouth twisted from a frown into a grimace. "But they're not without complications...I'll give her some more time. Another day or two. After that--" and he was out the door, leaving his sentence dangling.

Dr. Haniwa crossed to the door and stuck his head out, then exited and walked around the corner, then back down the hall in the other direction. Yakushi was nowhere to be seen. He verified the time on his watch--four o'clock, which was when Orochimaru expected Yakushi on attendance with him for some reason or other--and went back inside, satisfied that the boy was truly gone.

Still, he didn't take any chances: he shut the door and locked it, then went to the comatose girl and bent close. "I don't know if you can hear me," he said, keeping his voice low, "but if I were you, I'd seriously consider waking up. It's just--he means to make use of you, conscious or no. Awake, you might have some control over things...well, think it over. If you do come back and it gets too bad...I promise I'll give you something to get out of this. I hate to see you struggle so hard and then give in. There's always a chance, no matter how small."

Hinata opened her eyes and looked down at her body.

She was floating about five feet above her own head, feeling very much like a bubble or a balloon, bobbing gently on air. It was a very strange feeling, made even stranger by the fact that she wasn't upset at all about seeing her body lying before her. Before she had a chance to become frightened, her body's chest moved up and down and her hand, curled into a fist on the top of the coverlet, moved slightly. She slipped down and stretched out a hand, touching her cheek tenderly, feeling the warmth underneath her transparent fingertips.

_Ah, I'm still alive. That's fine then._

Everything in the room glowed faintly, including her and she admired the way her arm shone like a pearl in the odd light, waving it before her. _I feel...cradled....I feel...._

The door opened and Kabuto walked in.

Hinata had flashed across the room away from him before she even realised it, her joy swallowed by fear. _Oh no, no...not him._

_I'd almost forgotten..._

She watched, hands to her mouth, as Kabuto prodded her body, shone a penlight into her eyes, grabbed her wrist to take her pulse. There was a sour, ugly look on his face, and when he finished, he dropped her arm as if it was a filthy thing.

Away in her corner, Hinata's fist clenched. A heavy dullness was rising in her body, pushing her down: her feet touched the floor and she found herself looking at the back of Kabuto's head.

He didn't leave, but leaned on her covers, far too close to her body. "Why don't you wake up?" he muttered as she drew near softly. "Please...I don't want to have to get rough with you but if that's what it takes, I will."

The dullness crackled and surged and Hinata was limned with white-hot fire. _Rough with me! You...I won't let you! I'll never let you!_ she snapped and snarled, and reached for his throat.

_I'll kill you! I won't let you! I'll kill you_!

Kabuto gasped as her hand wrapped around his neck and she squeezed hard, for once taking pleasure in the kill. He thrashed, jerking backwards and Hinata, unable to let go in time, felt something hard shove into her and then darkness rose all around her.

For a moment she was in a deep red world, feeling oddly fat and she couldn't move her body freely any more: every time she tried, it felt like wading through thick mud. She could see her body but darkness rimmed her vision: then, something fell and everything turned fuzzy.

_What was that? What's going on?_ she cried out, her voice echoing. A persistent, steady beat was ringing in her ears and making her dizzy. _Where am I (It felt like I was choking! What on earth is wrong with me?) and how did I get here?_

_Huh? I never felt like I was choking (Was it some kind of attack, brought on by stress? My failure to awaken Hinata is weighing more heavily on me than I thought)._

_...Kabuto...Is it...Could it be...I'm hearing his thoughts..._

Feeling flashed around her: a headache, bending over to pick up a dropped pair of glasses, the rough wool of blankets beneath her fingers and the realization flowed over her like cool water. _I am...inside you. Kabuto._

That made things so simple, so easy. Now that she knew, she could recognize the red of blood and muscle, ivory arcs of bone, the strange wet shapes of organs. If Kabuto drew breath, moved, spoke, Hinata felt it: she was now a part of him, which meant--

--that obnoxious, persistent ringing--

His heart was located just where hers would be. She touched it lightly, one finger only, and Kabuto shivered suddenly, placing his hand on his chest. Hinata felt the sudden upswing of chakra and things began to shine blue: she didn't have much time before he healed her away, so she wrapped her hands around him and--

_That's really not a good idea_, a dry, heavy voice whispered from behind.

Hinata's hands contracted in shock and she almost crushed Kabuto's heart between her rigid fingers: he fell forward with a shudder and moaned into the blankets as she squeezed him. _W-Who said t-that, who's t-there?_

A hot gust of wind rose suddenly and pushed at her: she let go of Kabuto and raised her arms to protect her face as the sharp air slapped at her, shoving her down.

_S-Stop it! H-Help!_

Darkness swaddled her as the ground disappeared from beneath her feet. Breath, light, touch left and Hinata was away.

She fell for a long time, drifting aimless in the dark while things rumbled and hissed at her. Tiny lights sometimes appeared and then disappeared in an instant: things moved in those lights. She was so numb with terror that she couldn't be absolutely sure, but those things looked very much like...

_....snakes...._

_Yes_, the voice said from the darkness, surprising her.

_I am falling into a pit lined with snakes._

_It is my home. Such as it is!_

Hinata touched bottom: snakes under her toes. Snakes wrapped themselves around her ankles and pulled her down to sit: she stumbled, tugged away and cried out, but they didn't bite.

**Up**, a chorus of tiny voices whispered in her ear, _up, up up._

She looked and there were two enormous lights glowing golden in the darkness above her. Hinata could vaguely make out the curve and sweep of a head and a long body disappearing into infinity but all detail was lost in the darkness. Smaller curves (for smaller snakes?) bobbed along behind the largest one, less than more five, more than ten, she thought. As she watched, the lights dipped a little closer. _Hello, Hinata Hyuuga. I am not going to eat you._

_O-Oh....H-Hello. U-Um, h-how d-did y-you..._

_You are inside me now._

_I-I s-see...U-Um, w-who--_

_Do you really want to die over_ him? the voice asked, steeping the pronoun in contempt. _A waste of a life...because that's what will happen, you know. He dies, you die. Orochimaru will kill you slowly and you'll have accomplished nothing._

_B-But...O-Orochimaru depends on him._ The snakes brushed against her, soft on her bare skin. _Killing Kabuto would hurt Orochimaru..._

_Not that much. It would hurt, but only for a while. Then he'll find someone else and the cycle will repeat. Head of the snake and all that...Do you think that Kabuto is his first genius medic?_

_...he's horrible and dangerous..._

_and you could take him for yourself._

_What?_

The eyes glowed more brightly. _Just what I said._

_N-No, no I-I couldn't...Why, would h-he..._

The snakes moved faster, sliding across her legs and under her arms, while the voice talked calmly on.

_Everyone has a weakness, everyone, even him. And his failing is a particularly large and human one, though he hides it well. _

_I-I..._

_Just think of what you could do with his power and cunning at your side. Wouldn't it be such pleasure to have him on a leash? Isn't such a resource much better alive than dead? Bend him to your own ends. In the long run, it will be kinder to him._

_But...I hate him...and...he can't...be trusted..._

_I'm not saying you must make your move now. But, keep it in mind._

The burning eyes were growing larger and larger by the second, blotting out everything else in the world. Her body was beginning to flake away, as if she had burned to ash.

_Think on it,_ was the last thing she heard the voice say before she blew away completely. _Though, I am not sure how much of this you will consciously retain..._

Her arms ached with the cold and Hinata fumbled around for the blanket to cover them. A faint smell made her nose wrinkle: beef bouillon perhaps, and her stomach rumbled in agreement.

A pale crescent lay before her in the dim light and Hinata had to look at it for several seconds before she remembered what it was: _my hand..._

_I can still see..._ That brought her completely awake and she lifted that hand to touch her face, her fingers trembling. She felt nothing but smooth, unbroken skin and her eyes, when she brought her hand to them, seemed whole...

She continued to feel along her face, shivering. _Is this true? Is this true and not just a trick? My eyes are okay? But he cut them, I know he cut them, he took them apart, but now they're fine... _

_If this was a genjutsu, would I even know it?_ Her head began to ache. _I'd have no way to know it...maybe I'm sitting here with black holes in my face where my eyes used to be and he's watching and laughing at me... _

The table, when she reached her shaking hands out to it, seemed to be in the place where her eyes informed her it would be. There was indeed a cup of bouillon and a small dish of rice and toast along side it: the kind of food you would give an invalid recovering from a long illness. Her eyes filled abruptly with hot tears. The only thing to do is behave as if this is true and my eyes are okay...

She nibbled at the food and threw up most of it later, but when she awoke again, someone had cleaned up the vomit and left more food on the table. This meal stayed down and Hinata ventured up on shaky legs to explore her new room: very dark, built like her other room, with a bed, table, one chair, separate toilet room and a large, shuttered-off window. No light fixtures anywhere.

Food arrived on a regular basis, but no one came for her and Hinata began to wonder if this was Kabuto's new torture: leaving her sitting alone in the dark for the rest of her days.

Then one day (if it was a day: she was having trouble distinguishing time) Hinata passed by the window on one of her circuits around the room and felt cold air on the back of her neck. She stopped and the window rattled slightly, as if something was loose. Carefully, she lifted a hand and pressed her palm against, then pushed in. The cover moved and when she took her hand away, it swung out slightly.

Hinata stood there for several minutes, mouth open. _Did it...and if I..._ Heartbeat pounding in her ears, she slid a fingertip under the shutter and pulled, and it came away completely from the wall. The other, when pulled, did the same.

_The shutters were never locked._

Starlight danced above her, with a thin crescent sliver sailing over the horizon behind the trees. She was so glad and so grateful that she stood rapt for several minutes, forgetting everything but the night sky. _If I can look outside...things aren't so bad... _

Her next thought made all her joy came crashing down on her. _Wait, what if this is a trick? What if he deliberately left it open so he could punish me if I figured it out? He'd say I was trying to escape again! _

Shivering, she quietly and quickly resealed everything and went back to bed.

It was difficult to stay away once she knew the secret, however, and Hinata started sneaking tiny glimpses outside, always at night or on foul weather days when there was less likely to be anyone outside to see her. With an outside view, the days were easier to tell apart and she felt slightly more settled, though the knowledge that she would eventually see Kabuto again made her feel sick to her stomach.

The summons came not long after her window discovery. She was sitting up against the window watching rain fall on the trees outside, feeling a weak pleasure in the cold panes against her cheek, when someone rapped on her door. Hurriedly she moved away, back to the bed and pulled the bedclothes back up around her. The rapping came again.

"C-Come i-in."

The door opened and a short and fairly scrawny Sound-nin entered her room. Behind him loomed a much larger man and Hinata's heart twisted in her chest.

"Miss Hyuuga?" the smaller man said, almost respectfully. "If it's okay with you, Kabuto-sensei wants you to come to his office. Right now."

She wasn't dragged like last time: each man merely put a hand around her elbow and guided her down the hall. They moved slowly for her sake and when Hinata stumbled once, they stopped, made sure she was all right, then continued on.

Hinata had a vague sense of moving through more than one building as they walked: some of the areas were made in a different style from the section before--brick to wood, wood to iron--and the twisting corridors they passed through seemed to go on for miles. It might have simply been, she acknowledged, that she was very tired and very scared again.

Finally they reached a door that looked no different than any of the others they had passed in the clean white section they were currently on. The short Sound nin knocked and a muffled but familiar voice asked them to come in.

Black dots swam before Hinata's eyes but somehow she made it inside the open door and stood without falling: the Sound nin closed the door behind her and waited outside with the other. Her vision gradually cleared and she saw stacks of books, many glass-fronted cabinets and oddly, a anatomical skeleton that was missing the lower half of one arm.

"Over here," she heard and she managed to turn her head enough to see Kabuto sitting and what looked like drawing at a desk stacked with neat piles comprised of various books, papers and jars. A stool had been placed at the side of the desk and it was to there that he beckoned her. She went towards him slowly, unsteady on her feet.

There was a large window positioned directly Kabuto's head, crammed full of plants, Hinata noted to her vague surprise. As she drew closer, she began to recognize them--aconite, nightshade, angel's trumpet, lily of the nile--and her surprise dissipated, but there was a lone violet sitting in the middle of the poison and of that, she wondered.

Kabuto smiled at her as she sat down. "How are you feeling?"

"U-Um...o-okay," she whispered: her voice wouldn't come out any louder. "Uh...y-you're d-drawing?" It wasn't a hobby she would have expected from him.

He tilted the pad towards her and Hinata saw ovals, circles, lines and what might have been scribbled notes in characters she couldn't understand. "It's your eyes--beautiful, aren't they?"

She had nothing to say to that and Kabuto seemed to accept it: he worked in silence for several minutes more while Hinata sat and sweated into her robes, wishing he would get things over with.

"Well," he finally said, making her jump "I suppose I should tell you why I asked you here. I have a bit of a proposal for you.

"It's quite simple. I've been short-handed lately and need someone to handle menial tasks and assist with my research and experiments; in other words, a drudge. I'm willing to let you occupy the position--I'm sure you don't want to spend all your time cooped in your room, do you?--and in return for your hard work, I pledge to keep you as comfortable as I can while you're here. Your own room and bed, clothing. You'll eat the same food I do and you won't have to worry about starving unless absolutely everyone else is. You can go about on your own--within reason, of course. And--" he raised his hand and touched the ridge of cheekbone under her right eye very lightly, smiling when she shied away--"most importantly to you, I'll make it completely painless when I examine your eyes. Does that sound like a fair bargain to you?"

_What._ It took all her control not to tip backwards off the stool in shock. _Of all things...of all things...!_

Kabuto watched her face, looking disarmingly serious. When she failed to respond after a minute, he turned away and began working on his diagram again.

_This must be a trick...he's acting like I'm supposed to take him seriously, that he really wouldn't hurt me if I do as he says, but this must be a trick. _

"W-What if I-I...r-refuse..."

A long spiky line appeared under Kabuto's fingers: he extended it to the edge of the page and drew what looked like a triangle around the end. "Then you'll join the group I already introduced you to, the ones in the dark. I doubt you'll find their company or their filth very pleasant, though they certainly come up with some interesting ways to pass the time." A tiny smile played around the corners of Kabuto's mouth. "Lord Orochimaru values me for my ability to keep subjects intact long after they would have crumbled apart. I can keep you alive for years, even in the most degraded of circumstances. Would you be able to endure having your eyes sliced open and dissected without anesthetic week after week after week? Well. Maybe you would. Sometimes people grow inured, and then you have to find new methods...hmm. Oh, while we're on the subject: don't ever think of committing suicide. You would be absolutely amazed at how much leeway you can have when bringing someone back to life." He scribbled another note in his odd code and put a frame around it. "Personally, it would be a big hassle for me to keep you under those circumstances, not to mention that I would really prefer to study your Byakugan while you're in normal health. But, if you're not certain...I could arrange to have you spend a week or so experiencing the 'life' you would have if you decide not to accept my offer. Perhaps you'd be better able to make your decision once you're familiar with both potential outcomes, yes?"

Hinata's right eye throbbed, as if a needle was probing it, and she almost reached for it, but clenched both her hands tightly together instead. _Live those days, over and over again....but...Kabuto...as if that's not how I would live even if I said yes... _

"Well? I'm waiting."

_Please...please stop pretending to be sincere..._

"Miss Hinata. I don't have all day."

Her breathing thickened as she put the first spoke in.

"I-If I-I d-do accept, I-I w-won't hurt anyone, e-even if y-you threaten to k-kill m-me or t-torture m-me."

Both of Kabuto's eyebrows went up. "I'm quite capable of hurting people without your assistance, thank you. But I'll keep that in mind if the situation ever arises."

Sweat was pouring down her back in a long, steady stream."A-And..I-I w-won't tell y-you any of Konoha's secrets. I w-won't do anything that b-betrays the village."

He frowned at her, causing his glasses to slip, and pushed them back with an annoyed huff of breath. "Miss Hinata. Do you really think that you know anything that I don't? You're a _Chuunin_. They don't tell you anything of real importance to begin with and your family is not exactly loved by the ruling elite of the village: the Hyuuga have always been too independent and self-important for the Council's liking. That's why your cousin was turned down for ANBU, by the way...they knew if it came down to a choice between them and your family, your family would win out." He chuckled. "Funny...for that, he would have been better off if he had never reconciled with you and your father. But I digress. I have other spies in Konoha, you're not an elite shinobi, therefore you don't know anything of any interest to me, and I simply don't care about any Hyuuga secrets unrelated to the Byakugan. Everything else that I want I can easily learn from your eyes. Any other objections?"

She had no idea how he could possibly sit there and lie to her with such a straight face and even tone. Even such a wonderful liar as Kabuto couldn't keep up such a farce as this up for long; surely, if she looked at him and said yes, she would see the triumphant _silly little girl I've fooled you_ lurking in his eyes. She stared at her hands. He hadn't healed everything; there were still faint scars from her flight through the woods etching the backs of her hands and the tips of her fingers.

"W-Why d-do y-you think it's safe to let me have all this information? What i-if I-I'm rescued..."

Kabuto shrugged. "Because you won't be. No one has ever been able to descend into Sound and return alive. If you think finding us for a rescue mission is so easy, then why have neither Konoha nor any of the other shinobi countries found and tried to destroy us already? Hah, well, we do have treaties with some of them. You'll understand once you see some of the safeguards we have in place--that's if you agree, of course. And as I already said, it's much less hassle for me if we're on equitable terms with each other and you're able to take care of yourself for most things. The best and only true way to study a bloodline limit is to follow it as it changes over time, and since I have no access to an infant Hyuuga--yet--you're my next best subject. I really do look forward to seeing how your Byakugan evolves throughout the years."

If she didn't get away soon, she was going to be sick. "Um....I-I'm s-sorry, but...m-may I t-think about this for j-just a b-bit longer?"

"Of course," Kabuto said, not sounding surprised or put-off in the slightest. "Nidon-kun, Wakame-kun, please take Miss Hyuuga back to her room."

She locked the door and crawled back into bed, pulling the covers up and around her. If Kabuto was to be believed, there would be no bed and no covers if she refused. Dirt and the company of other starving bodies. Endless pain. That old man had told her he wanted to die.

But trying to live with him--and the mention of not having an infant Hyuuga _yet_!

_Why am I even acting like I have a choice in the matter...agreement or no, nothing would stop him..._

Hinata rolled over and pressed her face down into her pillow and smelled the slightly rancid scent of old feathers.

_Can I really stay down there in the dark._

She had been so grateful for those minutes watching the stars and the trees: even the cold had been a blessing for one half-smothered on Sound's dead air. Was thoses fragment of free time enough to keep her going through deep darkness and pain? Would she even be able to remember? Last time, her mind had gone crippled and numb. _If I tried to hold out, would I end up losing everything, I wonder...my memories might not sustain me, they might desert me and leave me totally alone..._

The image of her huddled senseless in a cell sent Hinata's muscles into spasm and for a moment she couldn't breathe. Kabuto was wrong: she already had brief, but first-hand knowledge of what her life would be like if she turned down his offer and...and...

_I think...that I would not be able to stand it. I am weak and I would not be able to stand it. And...I mustn't forget that whichever I pick, in the end, Kabuto will do whatever he wants with me. _

Her room was growing darker, the light moving to the corners. _But to give in and act as if I believed him. If, by some infinitesimal chance, he isn't lying...to go willingly and do whatever he says...he's crazy. Giving me all that knowledge, if he's truly planning on letting me assist him. What is he thinking? He might claim that I'm never going home, but there's always a chance and if I do, I'll have so much information on Sound's locations, routines, experiments, research to share--unless he's planning on faking all that too. I can't really put it past him...Going through all that trouble for me: oh, Kabuto-san, you really shouldn't have!_ she thought and almost giggled, feeling light-headed and silly.

_If he is telling the truth, I'd be a fool to refuse him. If this is, by the smallest, slightest chance, truth...but I don't believe him. There has to be a catch. Somehow. Somewhere. But if I can learn something...and get away..._

_Even though this is all fake, when he looks at me and laughs, when he drops the disguise...I'll look him right in the eye and I'll show him that I knew all along. That I was never fooled, not once. That I am not stupid._

_I know what you are._

_Down to the bone, I know what you are._

Kabuto was waiting for her answer but it was such relief to close her eyes.

Later on, someone shook her shoulder: she woke with a start and tried to roll away from the touch. The hand on her tightened and she looked up to see a red and white face looming over her, everything else invisible in the dusk.

_Painpainpainpaincat'sfacewarmthlifesavedme_

The figure reached up, removed the mask and then Kabuto was smiling down at her. "Sorry, did I startle you?"

"T-that...isn't that..."

"My disguise from the Chuunin exams, yes," he said, nodding to the mask in his hand. "Frankly, it's an old favorite of mine; a memento, if you will."

Hinata was still shaking. "W-Wh--"

"Ah, why am I dressed like this...? There's something that I have to take care of for Lord Orochimaru. However, before I leave, I wanted to know if you've made up up your mind yet."

"I-I'm sorry, I fell asleep...b-but...y-yes...I-I've decided." Her lips were parched and the words slow in coming. "A-As long as it won't hurt Konoha...I-I'll d-do as y-you ask."

Kabuto patted her hand. "_There's_ my sensible girl."

*You may have recognised this line from my Fifty Themes: One Sentence fic that I published, oh, three years ago. Slow Amaiko is slow, though it should give an idea of how long I've been working on this damn thing.


End file.
